Conventions are just blurs to me these days. I think this will be my last year staffing a convention since I’ll be headed off to nursing school in a month. W00t. This past week was anime expo, which celebrated its 20th anniversary. Good for them. I hope things are better for the SPJA now that the CEO has been changed. I’ll have to see what sort of budget cuts my friends who are on staff suffered through, but maybe things went ok. I wouldn’t know, I was selling Gundams all weekend at our awesome BandaiShowsOffitsE-Penis booth.
The booth design this year was a joint creative collaboration between Bluefin and Bandai Hobby. The previous year saw a somewhat cluttered booth that wasn’t organized very well and had crowding issues due to the displays being in the middle of the booth. This year under my direction we decided it would be best to separate the showcase area from the area where people could purchase merchandise. A few weeks of pushing ideas back and forth generated a number of design schematics. Each week Bandai also decided to keep adding new things to our layout which forced me to rethink the positioning of certain things. What they’re doing 2 dioramas? We need to build more cases for their dioramas? “Why do they want this thing here, that’s stupid!” “There’s too much wasted space here!” There was also the unfortunate part about Bandai wanting the booth to be more of a showroom than a place to sell things. They did want the sales area to be smaller to have more room for the display cases, but both sides compromised and we reached the booth that you all saw at Anime Expo. Some things could have been organized better, but it was a good layout. Bandai Collectors did not bother too much with AX since they were busy planning for the bigger show, San Diego Comi-Con. I think that department of Bandai is a little more organized than Hobby since I’ve already seen what they’re planning on shoving in the cases. Collectors did not have staff at AX, so their only presence was their merchandise in our booth. I had some fun posing some of the Figuarts =D
Now back in March we were asked which statue would we choose for display. Really? You guys are going to throw money at us? OK! Well I wouldn’t necessarily call it throwing money, I mean they are very serious about the U.S. market, so it’s only natural they would want to put out their big guns for these convention events. We could choose between 00 Gundam, Gundam Unicorn, and Gundam Exia. I recommended we choose the Unicorn because it was still an ongoing OVA and would be relevant for some more years if we wanted to re-use the statue. As May rolled around, we became concerned of a way to position the statue in the booth. That hexagon base while effective is pretty boring. I suggested we do a hangar, and if possible to replicate the MG Unicorn HD + cage model kit. Unfortunately we had to cut costs here and there to simplify the hangar. The arms that would hold the Unicorn in place were eventually axed off by Bandai Hobby on- site at Anime Expo. Screw them, the retraining arms would have been pretty cool. We might still try to incorporate this later. The statue on the other hand, looked pretty plain jane, and we had some initial reservations about how bland the Unicorn looked based on the photos in Hong Kong. “Oh hey let’s ask Clement and those gundam guys if they want to spruce it up.” I dunno who suggested that, but I agreed it would be a good idea for the statue to beautified upon arrival in the U.S. You can read more about the exploits those nerds put on here: http://gamerabaenre.com/?p=1977U Unfortunately this statue plus platform is too damn big for San Diego…we’re looking into the cost options to bring it to Otakon currently. Maybe.
This year we were visited by a lady from the Hobby department named Sayuri Matsuoka. You may not know it, but you’ve already purchased at least one MG model kit where she was one of the producers behind it. She’s currently the creative producer for the MG Wing and MG 00 line of kits. All those wing kits? Her idea basically. She’s quite the gundam fan and also skilled modeler. I overheard her comments toward our Bandai Hobby contact regarding the initial model kits placed in our booth on Friday….yeah she actually knows model terminology and can point out techniques used to achieve effects what with my limited Japanese vocab . There were initially 2 EXTREMELY well done kits placed into our booth: a Wing Zero TV ver and a OYW Gundam done in the 1/1 scale style and she had indicated to us that she had seen them before somewhere….it wasn’t until sometime later it was confirmed to me that a Japanese resident had built them and his U.S. friend was helping him sell the models. Wow that sucks, they were really well done and would have scored extremely high in the contest. She must be pretty alert on the Japanese modeling scene to have recognized the kits. Oh yeah, she also noticed the bootleg Nightingale kit….so she is also aware of other model companies besides her own. Nice. Though I’m a little annoyed our Bandai Hobby contact didn’t notice until she was pointing it out to him =/
A little footnote regarding the judging of the model contest: we were all unanimous regarding 1st place. Ha! After 1st place however, it was full blown personal taste and our own very different philosophies of how model kits should be viewed taking over. I and Fukuchi-san, another Bandai engineer had essentially the same ranking for entries, though our point awards were different. I was a little more harsh than he was on technical, whereas he was more harsh on paint finish. One of the comments from the Bandai staff was that the west coast entries were a lot better than the ones from New York last year. So….ok Otakon and New York, I think you need to step up your game or Bandai thinks yer pussies.
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