Updates from AX 2008 - 02

Simply stunning Yoko, to add to the many many beautiful cosplayers that we saw.

With day two of the convention upon us, it started off poorly as I lost my badge and was mind-scattered (for lack of a better word) for the whole first half of the day. However, after purchasing a few more figures and seeing some of the beautiful female cosplayers, my mind got more on track (into the gutter I go!).

The highlights of the day were definitely the modeling seminar that we sat in on. For those of you who don’t know, Anime Expo offers a lot of seminars or panels put on by “professionals” or other famous people in the industry that can give real-life advice or tutorials on some complicated anime-oriented questions. Being an aspiring artist and maybe, one day, figure-hobbyist, I wanted to visit a few tutorials or seminars and brush up on old skills or learn new ones that the pros had to offer. Sadly, a few of the seminars that I did happen to sit in on seemed to be more like infomercials than helpful tips or they barely progressed beyond very basic levels of artwork. However, as I said earlier, the modeling seminar was by far the best one that was put on, and I actually ended up buying a DVD of his by the end of the project so I could touch up on my skills by rewatching when I’m preparing to put together a figure in the future (it was only 5$, don’t worry :P).

Also, as many people may or may not know, last night was the historical AX IDOL competition! The competition was EXCELLENT. I honestly can’t compare it to previous years (since this is my first time attending AX), but, what I did see there was some pretty crazy stuff… especially on the voice acting end. All the voice actors were great, they were casted as either characters from Haruhi or Gurren-Lagann, of which the Gurren-Lagann casted actors were way better (maybe because the Haruhi voices are a little harder to fit into character with).

Actually, being 100% honest, if they had cast the three people that played Kamina, Simon and Yoko in the English versions of the anime, the English dub would have been better!

In the end, the voice actress who won was the girl who played Yoko, Ms. Chang (can’t remember the first name, Rho has it written down somewhere, he’ll probably update this post later) and the singing winner was a Ms. Moss (once again, I’m sorry!). I wanted either Yoko or the amazingly talented young man who played Kamina to win the voice acting, so I was pretty pleased when they announced her name, they had both fit their roles extremely well!

As for singing, I wanted the third contestant to win (I’m sorry I forget your name, will update when I get that paper in my hands!), she got me standing on my feet cheering and a great portion of the crowd to hold up their cell phones in awe. But the fourth contestant, Ms. Moss put a lot of energy into her performance and was pretty fearless having a good time up there, and I think the judges really appreciated that.

Although we didn’t get to meet up with Dancing Queen again today (www.howagirlfigures.com) :(, we’ll be sure to do a collaborative photoshoot later on and hang out later on!

Until next time, with much love,

-Ryo, Rho, Kazeryu, JMPspin