Chess Invitational tournament

Facebook manages to turn up all sorts of things & last week I managed to see an advertisement for Chess Competition Tryouts in my sidebar. The event itself was for 'tryouts' for an invitational chess tournament (to be held on August 12), with the aim of being filmed the following weekend (August 18-19) for eventual presentation online. The next day (and independently of my joining the Facebook event), I was contacted by Dan Meiers, the organiser of this event, with a view to having me involved in the event (Dan had managed to find me from this blog, so its good to see that the general readership is growing!).

The plan is to have an 8 player round-robin event, with all games filmed from a variety of cameras, with the final product being presented in some sort of internet-based format. To try and generate interest (as well as attracting strong players), Dan has put up $1000 as first prize! Although the prize money sounds great, I'm more interested in seeing how the final product turns out, as Dan wants to try to do something a little different in terms of presentation, or at least that is part of his idea for the event.
If people are interested in participating in the event, check the Facebook event page for details.
The timing of this event means that I will be missing out on the Super Rookies event at Box Hill Chess Club, which is being run to support the Victorian juniors playing in the Under 16 Youth Olympiad (6 of the 12 players in the three teams are from Victoria). I will also have to miss the Best in the West, which is an excellent weekender I have played in a few times in recent years. 

In terms of my interest in this invitational tournament, much of this stems from some blog posts from last year, concerning the De Groot experiements & ideas for videos. Given that the games will be filmed one at a time, there will be a lot of 'down time' for those not involved in the filming, so I am hoping that I will be able to put together something along the lines of what I outlined late last year related to the thinking of chess players. I'm not quite sure what I'll have in terms of equipment and surroundings, but I'll try to pack my voice recorder & camcorder & see what I can come up with. If anything does end up coming from it, expect to see it on my YouTube page, which has been rather dormant of late in terms of content.
Perhaps it could be a 'modern day' version of the Master Game, which was filmed in England in the early 1980s.