{"id":3816,"date":"2015-07-06T10:14:19","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T17:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamerabaenre.com\/?p=3816"},"modified":"2015-07-06T16:00:23","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T23:00:23","slug":"anime-expo-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamerabaenre.com\/?p=3816","title":{"rendered":"Anime Expo 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> since the audience at AX is just huge. There are thousands of people buying gunpla over this holiday weekend; the perfect opportunity for advertisement. <\/p>\n

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Done chatting a bit, we start to wander the hall. We hit up the Hobbylink Japan<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Friday rolled around and some of our wives came, so we ended up doing the entire hall trek. The wife picked up some shirts from Fat Rabbit Farm<\/a>, and I picked up a tri corgi butt shirt from the Lokisa booth<\/a> next door. I snapped a few more pictures from new additions to the GBWC contest shelves. And we just wandered around for several hours. Friday was going to be our long day as we had our 18+ Gundam Model panel that night at 8:30.<\/p>\n

The AV guy in the room was a bit of a tightwad. Some serious control issues with the kid, but it was all good, we got set up and were ready early. The previous panel was still ending when we wandered in, so we dropped off our gear and headed outside to where they had the line set up for our panel. We did some crowd work and handed out some SCGMC pins. In hindsight, we should have brought some of our shirts in backpacks and offered them to the folks that asked about our shirts when we were socializing. It was a pretty good time and we got some of the crowd pumped for the show.<\/p>\n

This year; we tried something different from the previous years. I’ve been doing these panels since 2006; and every once in a while, we change things up. Most of the time, the changes fail miserably; but I think this year was very successful. Instead of just me, Angel, Dan, and Mike joined in as part of the panel presentation. I had gotten the slides done the previous evening, actually, early that morning as I procrastinate a little too much when ever it comes time to do the damn things.<\/p>\n

The Drexel Grate, the guy that won the GBWC Prelim at Akon came up to use and introduced himself at our 18+ gunpla panel and took a picture with us. At Akon, Drexel and his group did a gunpla panel and according to Angel, they modeled their presentation after mine from last year. Pretty damn cool!<\/p>\n

Syd from Hobbylink.tv showed up as well and set up a camera. He had sent me an email telling me he was going to come and asking if he could video the panel. I told him that it was the 18+ panel, hence warning him that a good amount of the material will probably be unusable; but he came anyways. He also mentioned that there were several people who came by the HLJ booth that were pretty excited about the panel. Also damn cool!\\<\/p>\n

Having done this for 9 years, I’ve still not learned my lesson to be more prepared. I had some issues with my laptop, so good thing that I had Angel bring his. I also forgot to bring the tripod, so the wife had to capture the panel using her selfie stick and my gopro. AND, I didn’t set the gopro to use a higher ISO, so the video captured was REALLY dark. But I did some video editing to digitally fix that. Other than these little issues; I think the presentation went VERY well. The room capacity was 300, and we filled that with another 50 or so outside waiting to get in when folks inside left. And we kept a majority of the audience. The new format works very well. From the perspective of our wives whom have been forced to attend these multiple years; so their opinions are quite valuable as they see things we don’t get to see. We didn’t get to take many pictures at this panel, but at least we did get the video. Next year I’ll put the tripod on the checklist and we’ll definitely have a better video.<\/p>\n