AMV:

Action:

1st Place Judge – Alucard’s Sound of Madness
1st Place Audience – Some Ride it Ruff
2nd Place Judge – Rarity
2nd Place Audience – Dante Makes a Man out of Ryu

Drama:

1st Place Judge – Veni Vidi Vici
1st Place Audience – Tsubasa Falling
4th Place Audience – Ameno Tiara
Creator’s Choice – Guide Me

Comedy:

1st Place Audience & Judge – GoldenPants
2nd Place Audience – Ode to Cross Dressers
3rd Place Audience & Judge – Mean Woman Blues
Judge’s Favorite – It’s Tough to Be a Host

Pro:

1st Place Audience and Judge – Lord of the Anime
2nd Place Judge – Valhalla
2nd Place Audience – Standing Still
3rd Place Judge – You Know My Name
4th Place Audience – CityScape
Staff Pick – Diorama

Masquerade:

Best in Show: Workmanship
This is What You Give Me to Work With
Whitney Brown & Kiyoko Wakabayashi

Best in Show: Presentation
The Prince’s Tale
We’re Not Twins Cosplay

Workmanship Awards – Novice Division:

Technical Ingenuity Award
Evil Black Bunny Productions
Jeffrey Gerard

Excellence in Design
Romeo and Juliet’s Night at the Rose Ball
Laura Linnala

Honorable Mention for Detail
Dark Cloud 2
Robot Penguin

Honorable Mention for Armor & Leather Work
ia shake-zula of Anime Souffle
iakurosaki and DingSha

Best in Class
Soldier “A” Cosplay
Matt Wiseman & Amanda Avila

Workmanship Awards – Open Division:

Honorable Mention for Details
Wesley, Illyria, Gunn, and Spike from Angel
Li, Dawn, EJ, & Phil

Honorable Mention for Fabric Painting
Ahza Miracle
Cinthya Jeanneth Rmz

Armor and Wings and Jewelry, Oh My!
Do You Want to Date My Avatar?
Beth Hodgson & Jacob Hodgson

Perfection in Sewing
Good Enough Cosplay
Caistarrin T. Mystical

Obsession with Detail Award
Death by Sparkles
Garnet Runestar and Tenshi

Best in Class
The Prince’s Tale
Julia & Caitlin Doolittle

Presentation Awards – Novice Division:

Audience Favorite
Mangafreak 150 and Erin Chu
Mangafreak150 and Erin Chu

Honorable Mention for Performance
Fushigi Yuugi, The Mysterious Play
dot, Michi-chan, Melanie, Rin, Katie, & Britnay

Best Individual Performance
ia shake-zula of Anime Souffle
iakurosaki

Best Group Performance
Romeo and Juliet’s Night at the Rose Ball
Two and a Half Space Pirates

Presentation Awards – Open Division:

Audience Favorite
Ninja Stand-up Comedy
Mister Inu

Most Dramatic
Death by Sparkles
Garnet Runestar and Tenshi

Most Humorous
Do You Want to Date My Avatar?
Team Kaolinite

Best Individual Presentation
Good Enough Cosplay
Caistarrin T. Mystical

Related posts:

1. Back from Anime LA
2. Episode #0013 – Anime Expo 2010
3. Episode #0013 (Part 2) – Anime Expo 2010

I”ll try and schedule a recording session with The Gang soon to record our A-LA recap podcast. Look for that in the next week or two. In the meantime, here are my initial impressions and thoughts.

Anime LA, and the staff that runs it, continues to amaze me year after year. According to Chaz (the A-LA head honcho) this year’s attendance was just shy of 3,200, which, in this tough economic climate, is pretty amazing. I hear that some attendees came from places far outside of California, even. The Spoony Bards, this year’s musical guests of honor, came all the way from Indiana – Anime Los Angeles was their first appearance west of Chicago. Even more amazing is the fact that one of the Bards, who recently quit the band when she got married, rejoined the band especially for this appearance – and traveled here all the way from London, UK! One attendee even came from New Zealand! Anime LA is truly becoming a global phenomenon!

I definitely noticed the increased attendance, especially on Saturday (traditionally the busiest day). There was a certain buzz in the air; it had a certain energy to it that I normally only associate with much larger conventions. Even with the extra attendees, it didn’t feel crowded at all (except for Masquerade, which always feels crowded). It looks like A-LA will be able to stay at the LAX Airport Marriott for a while to come, which is good, because the hotel and facilities are really quite nice. Decent convention room rate, easily accessible from most modes of transportation, and a reasonable selection of nearby food.

Anime LA bills itself as one of the friendliest fan-run conventions out there, and I believe them. Every time I interacted with their staff (or saw others interacting with them), they were kind, courteous, and truly helpful. I didn’t detect a hint of the “attitude” that can often be found at larger conventions, or those that take themselves too seriously. The events (or at least the ones I attended) were well-staffed and it looked like they had enough people.

There were, I felt, a decent selection of events, including some that go beyond typical anime-related topics. (I don’t have a schedule handy, but the ones that come to mind are the Japanese calligraphy workshops, martial arts demos, handicrafts, Japanese ghosts and demons, and Tadao-san’s Japanese sword demo, which, sadly, I was unable to attend.) I’m always in favor of having events at conventions that go beyond typical anime fandom and explore other aspects of Japanese life and culture. One of my favorites were the food workshops (Sushi, fried foods, etc.) that Anime Expo featured several years ago.

The (always excellent) program guide and pocket schedule did a pretty good job of laying out the schedule of events and describing what they were all about. However there were a few that were described in vague terms, or even not described at all — for example, “Egg Samurai” — I’m still not quite sure what that was about… Also I was very pleased that A-LA posted a draft event schedule before the convention – for those of us obsessive types, it really helps us begin to plan out our convention time. However it might have been nice to have that up at least a week, maybe even two, before the convention – the extra time would really help those who are traveling from out of area and may not necessarily be traveling with a computer and Internet connection. I realize that sometimes it’s hard to nail things down until the bitter end, but even a rough preliminary schedule is better than nothing.

They did a pretty good job of communicating event and schedule changes. Changes were indicated on signboards outside each room, plus they also published a daily newsletter (the Shinbunshi) with scheduling changes as well as other items of note. These were fairly liberally scattered around the convention area, and were hard to miss. One thing I’d like to see for the future is for them to start using social media such as Twitter and Facebook. We are living in the age of social media, and almost any cell phone these days can access it ubiquitously, making it an excellent way of staying in touch wherever you are. FanimeCon stands in my mind as the “gold standard” in this department. Their Twitter account was extremely active both before and during con, with frequent updates when schedules changed, and they also sent out reminders of when certain “big ticket” events (concerts, Masquerade, etc.) were to start. With FanimeCon’s Twitter loaded on my phone, I almost never had to consult their pocket program guide. They also used it to remind people before con of certain important dates (pre-reg closing date, hotel reservation, etc.).

The guest list was pretty impressive for a small/fan-run convention. (unfortunately for a convention of this type it’s difficult to get those “big draw” guests, Japanese guests of honor, etc.) They had a pretty good musical selection. I got to see some of the Spoony Bards’ Sunday concert and they were pretty awesome; they played a nice selection of anime and video game music that had me nodding and thinking to myself “Oh yeah, I remember that one…” They also entertained the crowd lined up for Masquerade during the long interminable wait to get seated. I was also surprised to see the beginnings of industry support for A-LA; for example this year FUNimation chose Anime LA for an advance screening of their latest title, RIN ~ Daughters of Mnemosyne. (Unfortunately I was unable to attend)

I really hate to overuse it, but Masquerade can only be described as “awesome.” There were 29 entries consisting of a total of 76 people, and the costumes and routines continue to amaze. There are truly some talented people out there! As I recall it didn’t start too late, and there were only a few minor technical glitches (which are pretty much par for the course in an event such as this).

AMV, on the other hand, was, I hate to say, made of fail. I wrote about this previously so go read that post if you haven’t seen it already. However, none of the problems (I think) were the fault of the staff – they were all technical issues which, perhaps in hindsight, could have been avoided, but may not have been easily anticipated. My recommendations that I wrote about still stand, and hopefully they will take steps similar to the ones I outlined to make next year’s AMV contest a success. (They did replay all AMVs the next day, without a hitch, and the audience was invited to cast ballots for the Pro category that was skipped during the actual AMV contest.)

(I’ll post a list of AMV and masquerade winners shortly. Unfortunately not all of the AMVs have made it online yet.)

The dealers’ room and artists’ alley were impressive, and definitely felt bigger than last year, and most of the traditional vendors you see at dealers rooms were well represented. For one thing, they actually had some decent DVD vendors. Yay! I picked up some good deals on some stuff I was looking for. Of course, I’ll be reviewing my purchases for Otaku no Podcast. They also had several cosplay-related sellers, weapons sellers, character goods, etc. And it looked like artists’ alley was doing some good business – every time I looked in on it it was always pretty packed.

The video screening rooms had a decent selection of titles and genres. Support came from FUNimation, Nozomi Entertainment/The Right Stuf International, Bandai Entertainment, AnimEigo, Central Park Media (apparently this support came from beyond the grave — creepy!), Section 23 Films, Sentai Filmworks, Viz Media and Media Blasters. They also featured certain “Dealer’s Choice” titles, which, presumably, were whatever the dealers in the dealers’ room wanted to promote sales of. One thing I really liked was that they had big bright LCD screens outside of each viewing room showing the name of the title being played and what looked like example scenes from the various anime that they were showing. Really nice touch there. They also split the titles fairly equally between dub and sub, which prevented the holy war to end all holy wars from occurring.

I am once again thoroughly impressed with Anime LA. It’s the little con that could, and is showing no signs of letting up on its growth. It serves as proof that, even in these times of economic hardship, anime conventions are still needed, and are still viable. My congratulations to the staff and volunteers for yet another enjoyable year of Anime LA.

I’ve got about 1500 photos to go through, edit/retouch, and post; I’ll try and get to that by this weekend. I’ve also got about half an hour of video that I’ll edit down into a highlights reel and post soon.

Related posts:

1. Anime LA Day 2 mid-day convention report
2. A Winner is You! Behold the Anime LA 2010 AMV and Masquerade Winners
3. My Anime Los Angeles schedule

Anyway, back to tonight’s AMV contest. For starters, they were late letting us in. No biggie there – late starts and line-ups are pretty much par for the course when it comes to an anime convention, and we’re used to that sort of thing. Once we finally got seated, however, the event didn’t start – they were running late. Again, no biggie, and at least they were running AMVs from previous contests on the big screen to entertain us while we were waiting.

Then things started to go south. Specifically, the computer that was running the AMVs started freaking out. Badly stuttering/pausing video, sound dropouts, Windows crashes (did I mention this was being run on a Windows machine?), and multiple occurrences of the Windows “USB device connected/disconnected” sound (which seemed to indicate problems with an attached USB hard disk – presumably the source from where they were playing the videos.) The natives began to get restless, and there was some jeering and heckling from the audience (some of which, I’ll admit, came from the Otaku no Podcast camp).

Finally, the MC, the inimitable Tadao Tomomatsu, appeared on stage to get the ball rolling. Only… it didn’t. Again, frequent video stuttering/pausing, sound dropouts, program crashes, etc. If it weren’t for his (sometimes corny, but always funny) jokes and entertaining stories, I fear the scene would have turned very ugly. While he vamped, the tech crew was busy trying to get things to work. Finally, they got it working more or less, with only the occasional slight audio glitch, and we proceeded through the Drama, Action, Comedy categories. But there wasn’t enough time to show the final category (“Pro,” for high-production-value videos, similar to the “AMTV” category in Anime Expo’s AMV contest).

So what went wrong here? Let’s do a little hypothetical post-mortem analysis here…

I’ll ignore the late start/late seating issues, as these are common at conventions. Clearly the main issue was technological in nature. What happened?

First of all, it turns out that the computer being used was the personal computer of (presumably) one of the A-LA staff. This was his (or her) gaming rig. It would have been far easier to use a less, umm, riced-out machine. Less complexity and all that. Almost any machine is capable of playing back video these days, even many lower-end notebooks (and even some netbooks).

Second, apparently the videos were being played back from a USB Drobo – a professional-grade highly redundant external storage device. Again far more complexity than was needed. It would have been much simpler to use a standard USB external hard drive, such as a Western Digital My Book. (Or even a USB thumb drive, which are pretty much bulletproof and highly reliable.) It turns out that the Drobos require specialized drivers for the best functionality – during one of the periods when Tadao was vamping, tech staff were frantically downloading the latest Drobo drivers and software.

Finally, it looked like the videos that were supplied for the contest were in a variety of different formats. Unfortunately there’s not much you can do about this. Working with video is a complex procedure, especially given the wide variety of formats that AMV source material comes from (retail DVDs, fansubs of various formats, and now HD video). You could attempt to use one of the video “Swiss Army Knives” – programs that attempt to decode and play back a wide variety of video formats. (in fact it appeared that they were using VLC, one of these type of programs.) Unfortunately sometimes even these versatile tools fail or generate undesired results. You could also enforce a “standard format” that all submissions must be sent as – say, for example, H.264 video with a maximum bitrate of 1500, and a maximum resolution of 720×480. The tools for converting between video formats (transcoding) are widely available and generally work well enough. Or – best of all – standardize on the DVD format. Most computers these days come with DVD burners, the DVD format is robust and reliable (it’s withstood the test of time), and it is very difficult to screw up computer-based DVD playback software. And if the unthinkable happens and the computer crashes or whatever, then all you have to do is hook up a cheap $40 Wal-mart DVD player to your A/V system and you’re back in business.

Lastly, I feel that most, if not all, of these problems would have been averted, or at least lessened in severity, if the staff had used Macs in the video preparation and/or playback workflow. I’ll acknowledge that Windows has done some serious catching up in the multimedia department in the past 20-odd years that it’s been out; however I still firmly believe that the Mac still has an edge when it comes to working with digital media, especially video. (and before you hit that “comment” button – I don’t want to turn this into a “my computer/OS is better than your computer/OS” thread. So stop right there. If you still feel the need, please do so by contacting us directly.) One of the conventions I spoke of last year, FanimeCon, used a completely Mac mini-based video playback system for all of their screening rooms, and (to my knowledge) did not have any computer-related video playback problems whatsoever.

I do feel I must give credit where credit is due, however. The staff did their darndest to ensure that “the show must go on.” And if it weren’t for the always-entertaining Tadao-san — like I said earlier — things would have turned REAL ugly. Finally, unlike Anime Expo of several years ago, A-LA actually had an AMV contest. They didn’t mysteriously lose their files or equipment, with no backups to be found anywhere.

I’ll post links to all of the AMV candidates (as well as links to their entries at AMV.org where available) when I’m less tired. Tomorrow’s looking to be a pretty full day, and in order to survive it, I really do need my beauty rest. Oyasumi nasai…

Related posts:

1. Watch your downloaded anime on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad with Air Video (Updated)
2. Back from Anime LA

Besides being a truly excellent AMV, this also serves as yet another example of that old adage “never judge a book by its cover.”  On first blush, Card Captor Sakura looks like a kids’ show, and indeed it has its cutesy kid elements, with the cute characters, bright colors, etc.; however, when you strip all that away, what you find at its core is really a very deep, dramatic, exciting, and enjoyable story.  The takeaway from all this is that it’s nice to step out of your comfort zone every now and then and try something new, a new title in a genre different than what you usually get.  It’s something I’ve started to do lately.  Now, admittedly doing this was a lot harder to justify several years ago, back when you actually had to pay fairly big bucks for an anime DVD; but in today’s world of low(er)-cost “classics” releases and discount “thin pak” box sets available at discount retailers such as Amazon and Right Stuf, “all-you-can-eat” video rental services such as Netflix or RentAnime and online streaming sites such as Crunchyroll, it’s not only possible, but easy and cost-effective to do so.

Anyway, back to the video.  Here it is, in all its glory and awesomeness.  Mad props go to Otaku Outpost for creating this wonderful video. If you want to download the higher quality version, or read more about the methods and methodology behind the creation of this video, head on over to the AMV.

(PS: if this instilled in you a great desire to see Card Captor Sakura, beware – there is a similar sounding title “Card Captors” that was in fact an early English dub – but a horrendously butcherized ones.  Entire episodes were left out, large parts of the remaining episodes were chopped out, and the lines were rewritten to focus more on action.  Avoid it at all costs!  Fortunately they wised up and released the unedited episodes, with the original Japanese audio and English subtitles, under the “Card Captor Sakura” title.  Unfortunately it’s out of print now; however you might still be able to find it at some of the DVD rental houses or perhaps online.  Trust me.  It’s worth it.)

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