I’m writing today’s post in Brno, the vowel-deficient capital of Moravia, where I’m a guest at the Czech convention Animefest 2012. We’ve just done my workshop on the way that anime are put together, adding two more bonkers ideas to the catalogue of previous pitches. As regular readers of this blog will know, my notorious hothouse rantathon, as seen at the Irish Film Institute and Media Academy Wales, as well as for numerous academic and private clients, dumps an unsuspecting group of creatives in at the deep end and forces them to come up with a pitch for a non-existent anime show.

In the past we’ve had Decontaminators, which sold soap to unwashed urchins, and the Egyptian-themed Hattie Bast: Mummy’s Girl, the post apocalyptic eco-drama Fallen Angels and the time-travelling Chronokids. Not forgetting Choc Shock, in which alien space pirates attempt to liberate Earth’s reserves of cocoa.

Today in Brno, the rival teams came up with Miracle Dance: Dimensions, in which feuding nobles control fighting robots through the power of dance, and Capek’s Machine, a steampunk time-travel epic in which two brothers square off against a zombie Hitler, with the aid of an Egyptian princess. And I think there was a pirate in there, too.

The finish was such a frenzy that I forgot to give them my usual speech about “monocultures”, but I think they had worked it out for themselves by that point. And then just a couple of hours rest before my big speech, delivered in the round, to a standing-room-only crowd of catgirls, Vash the Stampedes and Hollows.