There are two events happening this weekend! On Saturday, October 3, 2015 International Plastic Modeler's Society (IPMS) Orange County is holding their annual contest. There are usually about 400-500 models entered into this competition each year. Back in 2003, this…
This last month has been a busy one; and time is flying by so fast; where the hell did summer go? Oh yeah, I spent a week in Santiago, Chile, it’s winter down there; but still, time seems to be on fast forward. We’re about 2 months away from this year’s Southern California Gundam Model Competition! Are you ready?
This is our 5th year of the competition; and with that, we have a much bigger venue. So for those that have attended previous years’; THE VENUE LOCATION IS DIFFERENT THIS YEAR!!!
Grand Hall
Fullerton Community Center
340 W Commonwealth Ave
Fullerton, CA 92832
I’ll try to cover everything about the contest in this post, so this will be pretty long. But to make things a little easier, I’ll have the bookmarks below that will click to the specific topic area.
SCGMC 2015 T-Shirts
SCGMC 2015 Categories
SCGMC 2015 Judging Guideline
SCGMC 2015 Forms
SCGMC 2015 Live Demos
SCGMC 2015 Vendor List
We also do a Live Gunpal Building broadcast bi-weekly (every other Tuesday at 7:00PM PST) And we have a broadcast scheduled for tonight (September 8, 2015 @ 7:00PM PST) So feel free to ask any questions about SCGMC during the broadcast.
A group of us representing Those Gundam Guys went to Anime Expo, as we have been doing for the past several years to participate in the Gunpla Builders World Cup preliminary competition held by Bluefin. Dan, Angel, Mike, and I brought up our kits and put them into the display case on Thursday. We chatted with some folks spending most of our time trying to promote our show, the Southern California Gundam Model Competition since the audience at AX is just huge. There are thousands of people buying gunpla over this holiday weekend; the perfect opportunity for advertisement.
Done chatting a bit, we start to wander the hall. We hit up the Hobbylink Japan booth, and I chatted with Jim, whom I’ve known over the years as we talked about figure models. He’s a very talented resin figure modeler, so we usually exchanged pictures of our recent builds and such. A few days later, I told him that Volks was in the hall, and he was surprised. He’s a big fan of Volk’s figure kits and was unaware of their presence this year. I also got to meet Syd from the Hobbylink.tv web shows. I invited him to the gunpla panels we host, and left him my card with my website/contact info. I got a nice chuckle when he looked at my card and said he had heard about my site. He told me he’d email me if he could make on of the panels.
The group decided to start at one end of the hall and try to get all the booths. That didn’t work out very well. By about 3PM, we were beat the hell up, and only got half of the exhibit hall. They’ve added hall G to the convention and massively expanded things. We visited the Volks booth and I immediately grabbed a Revy kit I had been eyeing for a while at the Volks booth. I was pretty surprised they brought so many resin figure kits. Actually, this is prolly the first time in well over 10 years that I have found resin kits at AX. The other guys in the group eyed the products at the Volks booth, and eventually, over the next few days, Angel and Mike ended up buying Bang Dolls and Dan picked up a Mari resin figure kit from Evangelion. HAHAHA, slowly I’ll get all these guys building a resin figure.
The original plan was to get through the entire hall, then leave; we got through half and gave up. We had 3 more days, well, for a few of us, we had 2 more days.
This past Sunday was the 25th Anniversary ValleyCon event. Damn, SCGMC is coming up on 5 years…. I can only hope to be as successful to get another 20 years. This year was different from the past several years that I’ve attended – they held the contest at the Ronald Reagan Library, under the old 707 Air Force One. Damn cool. There were also cars on loan from the Peterson Auto Museum as well as an old Marine One. We were allowed into Air Force One and Marine One, but no pictures were allowed inside. Damn cool to walk the insides of these aircraft.
It was a very impressive show. They had over 600 entries. There were alot of amazing entries and I didn’t have time to snap pictures of everything because there was just so much more to see and do that the library.
Some more details and commentary after the jump.