July 27, 2008

  • Comic-Con Saturday July 26 recap

    Thanks to my friends, I did not have to deal with the trolley in the morning, as we drove to the convention center. We got there at 8AM, and the line to "hall H" for the "Heroes" panel was already all the way out to the back of the building. Apparently people have been waiting in line over 12 hours already! Crazy ey? By the time I got in, the whole hall H was probably about 2/3rd full.

    This would be the first time for comic-con to hold a TV show panel in the very huge hall H, and it was a wise decision because the "Heroes" panel was fan service worthy. The creator, writers, artists, and the whole main cast of the show (and that's a lot of them) were present. They showed a webisode, and they actually showed the first episode from the upcoming season. They probably could have used another half an hour more for the panel, but they ran out of time.

    "Lost" had a rather unusual panel. It starts off with videos of a faux documentary about the "Oceanic 6," another one introducing the new regular cast members, and a clip "taken four years from now." Creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were on stage, and they had this "fake" Dharma  initiative representative, talking about this recruitment thing that they are doing. The panel was primarily a question and answer session, and it was funny that they had different specific prizes based on the question that were asked. Matthew Fox then made a surprise appearance. Afterwards there was a sequence where one of the "recruits" went rogue and wanted to "spill the secrets." They then showed a video of the guy walking through the actual exhibit hall of comic-con, as if it was the Dharma Initiative building. Highly entertaining.

    I was going to the "Attack of the Show" panel next, but it was completely full. I took that as an opportunity to walk the exhibit hall. I'm glad I did that, because I was able to get a lot of photos of cosplayers. It reminded at how many cosplayers there are roaming the floor on Saturdays, considering that normally it would be a day I would be stuck inside the panels.

    Universal pictures had their panel promoting several movies. "The Mummy : tomb of the dragon emperor" had their main cast from Jet Li, Brendon Frasier, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh, etc show up, as well as showed a scene from the movie. "Death Race" had Jason Stathan, Ian Mcshane, Tyreese, etc, as well as showed a scene from the movie. Director Sam Raimi made an appearance for his new movie "Drag me to hell," with Alison Lohman and Justin Long, and the clips they shown were oddly scary and funny at the same time. Finally they had "Land of the Lost," and humorously they had what I'm sure was a fake video conference with Will Farrell who "claims" that he couldn't hear the questions well.

    Sony pictures started off their panel with the more "edgier" version of the "Quarantine" trailer. Then "Underworld : rise of the lycans" had it's main stars present, as well as gave us a taste of an unfinished trailer for the movie. "The Pineapple Express" had a great panel, and showed scenes from the movie that proved that this will be an entertainingly hilarious action / comedy. Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny Mcbride, etc, made the Q&A section hilarious. Seth Rogen in particular has a future at comic-con as a new fan favorite panel to go to.

    So off to the masquerade photo area, to take more pictures of costume folks. There's definitely more people taking advantage of this option, so I wonder if this will be a problem in the future as space will be an issue.  It's fun to take pix of the cosplayers, especially the costumes that are really really well crafted, but sometimes i'm still shocked by how near naked some of the females can get. Wooh! Speaking of which, after all these years of me doing this, I still have an issue with something about the photo area. Now, this is the impression that I get, but the "director" in the photo area that tells the cosplayers how to position themselves on stage, needs to be a little less obvious whenever he is telling the female ones to specifically stand, kneel, or whatever, when clearly it's just an attempt to put them in a more "exploitative" pose. Ah well, he is a guy afterall.

    As it usually is every year, the masquerade contest started and ended well past it's schedule. By the time I was personally done taking photos from the masquerade ball, it was already pass 12:30AM! Since I had to take the trolley back to the hotel at that kind of hour, I did not get back to my room until about 2AM. I still needed to update this blog and upload the photos I took from the day, which by the way was over 850 pictures taken just from Saturday alone! I'm going to have a lack of sleep and be really tired for Sunday.