I’ve just got back from the first official Pecha Kucha Night in Manchester, which I attended with Dave Verwer. We’ve held Pecha Kucha style presentations quite a few times at GeekUp but I hadn’t until this evening been to any official Pecha Kucha events since I first experienced it during my trip to Copenhagen for reboot8 earlier this year. The minute I found out about the Manchester Pecha Kucha Night I promptly ordered my ticket. The ticket cost me £15 as a non D&AD member or student, I feel the event was slightly overpriced but I’m glad I attended and would like to thank Max Fraser from Pecha Kucha Nights UK and the D&AD for bringing Pecha Kucha to Manchester.

The event took place in Screen 18 at Odeon Cinema in The Print Works, which had a very impressive turn out of about 350 attendees. The speakers in order of appearance, Tim Parsons, Nick Bell, Brendan Dawes, Jai Redman, Nick Johnson, David Fisher, Liz Birkbeck, Emma Booty, Jo and Christoph Shaw, Klaas Diersmann and Sakurako Haino. I’m not going to review each speaker but I was disappointed with the talks by Liz Birkbeck’s which was just a plug for her company Bubble, and the talk by Klaas Diersmann and Sakurako Haino who had not prepared and stood for 6 minutes just giggling to themselves and saying “um yeah”. On a positive note I was impressed with the work by Urban Splash and the talk by Jo Shaw, Christoph Shaw and Kevin Boniface which had me and the rest of the audience in hysterics from both the content and the fact that Kevin wasn’t able to speak properly because of a cough.

After the event myself and Dave grabbed a coffee in a nearby bar and chatted about various things including the projects we’ve both got on the go along with new ventures. One new projects is to contact and convince Kevin Boniface to create a podcast because his work was really great, I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out but you can listen to some of his work over on his myspace page.

I’ve uploaded some photos to my flickr account should you want to have a look, I warn the quality is pretty shocking.