The Southern California Gundam Model Competition was this past weekend, Nov 11, 2023. If you were there, thanks for coming! I mean, I chatted with folks from New York, Boston, Washington DC, Pittsburg, Denver, etc. A good number of these folks flew/drove out here specifically to this show. One of the folks from Pittsburg came up and said hi to me and I completely didn’t recognize him – the last time I saw/talked to him was 2006 (a good 5 years before our first SCGMC – and SCGMC has been around for 12 years now – ugh, I suddenly feel old AF). So if you missed it this year, try to make it next year and here’s what you missed:
Panels we had:
The Vendors:
We don’t have a date/venue nailed down yet, but we’ll be working on that for the next few months. That said, we do have next year’s theme announced: “Seed” The theme usually ties into something Gundam related – for instance, next year will be the release of the Gundam SEED movie, and with that, there should be tons of Bandai merch on the subject. But for those that know us, things can take a very creative or dark turn as you guys are very good at the outside of the box thinking we look for; I mean, you guys ought to be after 12 years of SCGMC theme training. For those not familiar, the theme is an overarching “add-on” game of sorts that can be part of any of our 16 categories
We had 101 individual entrants this year with 316 competition kit entries. This doesn’t include all the display kits that folks also brought that were not entered into the contest. Not bad for a Gundam focused model contest. We got most of the pictures of the kits and apologize if we missed yours. There is quite a bit happening behind the scenes to get this running as smoothly as we possibly can. Right off the bat, below is the link to a PDF file with the winners and pictures.
Folks that are interested in our judging criteria, we are pretty transparent about it and this is a list of things we look at and how we focus our contest criteria, it is a general guideline that we give our judges, but their own subjective views play into things as well: SCGMC Judging Criteria We run with very similar style to IPMS. We have a minimum of 3 judges per category. Each judge is tasked with looking over the kits and finding the BEST 5 kits they believe will win an award. The judges then meet up and compare their picks. Most of the time, 80% of the picks line up. But for some that don’t, each judge points out issues they see, or good things they see to “fight” for their picks. Once the dust settles for that and the three judges agree on the top 5 picks, they go into judging – individually; and their individual judging sheets are turned into our data entry folks that just enter the numbers. We have an spreadsheet program that takes these raw numbers and does all the calculations we need to find the winners.
Seeing pictures online and seeing the real models inches from your eyeball with a flash light to find every amazing detail, or every mistake are two very different things. Things can look amazing in pictures on line and be completely different in person. They can be utterly mind-blowingly amazing in person, or just really show some hidden mistakes only seen up close and personal. This is what makes it so hard to judge sometimes because we need to be REALLY nitpicking about things. It is also why we have 3 judges and average the points awarded so it is as fair as we can make it.
Ok, enough soapboxing, here are the pictures from the show (we completely missed taking pictures of the Juniors and Beginner’s categories – so those pictures are missing for now – hopefully I’ll get sent those pictures and I can add it to this list soon):
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If you made it all the way down here, again, thanks for coming and if we missed your kit in the above pictures (*cough*Beginners/Juniors*cough*), let us know and shoot us an email, we can always add it to this list (please, pictures of your kit taken at the show!) We’ll post next year’s data and location when we get that information. But you have our theme for next year and you have our category list. (HINT: if you saw a category that had less entries, try building in that category!) See you all next year!
