Friday, August 15, 2014

What We Do In The Shadow Limits

What We Do In The Shadows is a 2014 New Zealand mockumentary which follows the exploits of a group of Wellington vampires. It’s been a big hit in New Zealand. It’s very funny and you should go and see it if you get the chance – it will be released in Europe on or around Halloween.

A “Shadow Limit” is a banking term which describes an unadvised limit which allows a credit-worthy customer to borrow beyond their authorised overdraft or credit card limit.

What We Do In The Shadow Limits is our team name for the Battle Of The Brains 2014 charity quiz night organised by ANZ.  This year the theme is “A Night at the Movies”, hence our choice; surprisingly (to me at least) we were the only ones with that idea. In previous years we’ve gone as Yes We Can!, Grexit and Gorgeous Georges.

I scored my costume off TradeMe - it was a cheap option - and accessorized it with my own waistcoat. We had semi-professional make-up done by one of the team members who does stage make-up. Whilst some of our team opted for the full white-face and undead look, I decided on just the dribbling blood. I also had some vampire fangs, but these turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, so I ditched them. The rest of our team headed down to the Costume Cave to get vampire costumes, where they found that they couldn't just get costumes like those from the film - they could get the actual costumes! The film had been a very low-budget affair, and apparently they'd hired from Costume Cave rather than have a fully-fledged costume department.




Suitably attired, we made our way over to the TSB Arena for the quiz. It's been held here since the earthquake in August 2013 damaged the Amora Hotel, which was our previous venue. It's not as intimate a venue, and the event does get a bit lost in the cavernous space, as opposed to the ballroom at the Amora.

There has also been a bit of a change in the organisation, and we no longer get updates throughout the evening to see where we are on the leader board, which is a bit of a retrograde step. They announced the top three teams halfway through, but we weren't in that, so had no idea how we were doing. Nevertheless, we ploughed on regardless, buying beer (part of the price contributed to Daffodil Day) and buying raffle tickets, which failed to net us anything. We were also robbed when it came to the best costume competition - Mrs Brown won that.

So that's that for another year. When I find out where we finally placed I'll update this.


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