The night started off with a hustle, bustle and flurry of getting a free drink from the bar and then rushing to get a good seat. This zoner by-passed the beer queue, a sacrifice that was rewarded with a seat with a view and the ability to drive home.

The first Christchurch Pecha Kucha Night was a hit bringing together a range of artists from many disciplines (fine artists, designers, architects, sound artists, photographers and chiefs). Each artist/designer showed 20 slides of their work, each of which was shown for 20 seconds — giving a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds. The speed-racer pace forced the artist to summarize his/her work in what often resulted in comic styling.

Pecha Kucha started in Tokyo, Japan in 2003 and has since spread to more than 120 cities, including London, San Francisco, Seattle, Rotterdam, Shanghai and Berlin.

This zoner’s highlight would have to be news of a fabulous new sport about to sweep our nation and the world - Chess-Boxing , the exhausting physical and mental sport was a knock out with the audience.

Chess Boxing merges two contradicting sports of opposite disciplines, pushing their athletes to the limit, mentally as well as physically. Six lightning rounds of speed chess alternate with five rounds of boxing. In a maximum of eleven rounds, the decision will come either through K.O. or check mate. Although we did not get to see a round in progress the slides shown demanded instant awe and respect (along with side splitting laughter) for these crazy athletes.

The next Christchurch Pecha Kucha Night is planned for late July, with this zoner planning to be a regular Pecha Kucha attendee (perhaps having taken up a new sport).

And the award we have all been waiting for….this weeks zoner of the week award is a tie going to our own maybe baby ‘Mini Murray’ who having decided to brave the Christchurch frost 2 weeks early, considerately put their grand entrance on hold so Murray could come in to work and do spectacular Crocs and Jibbitz artwork, meeting his deadline and making the design world a better place.

Mini Murray we appreciate your timing and are all looking forward to your arrival.

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The second winner, Tim who seeing an opportunity to ‘make it better’ reconstructed our presentation page format so that Timezoneone designs in the future will be presented bigger and better.

Maria