PMX Day 1 Report

Unfortunately, AudioBoo for Android is currently down until further notice, so you’ll have to put up with a textual report for now.

Well, day 1 of PMX draws to a close.  Unfortunately, as most of the day was spent on trains and buses, as well as finding our hotel and locating some sources of food, I didn’t get to see much of the con.  (Pro tip: definitely, DEFINITELY seriously consider taking up your con’s room block offer.  It is TOTALLY worth it to be able to stay on site close to the action.)  What I did see however was pretty cool.  PMX has a nice, fairly laid back feel to it; more akin to a smaller convention like Anime LA.  If I were to hazard a guess as to the attendance, I’d say several thousand (but probably not over 9000).  Unfortunately I can’t find any attendance data newer than 2004, at which anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 attended, depending on who you talk to.

There were definitely quite a few cosplayers in attendance, but I didn’t see very many anime character cosplayers, at least ones I easily recognized.  Rather, the bulk of cosplayers were wearing outfits representative of various Asian fashion styles (gothic lolita, etc.), or Asian live action stars, musicians (visual kei, etc.) and so on. (Makes sense, as PMX bills itself as a convention covering Asian pop culture in general)  I suspect that this may change tomorrow, since Saturday (tomorrow) is usually the highest attendance day for weekend cons, and is also the day that CosFest, PMX’s cosplay competition (i.e. Masquerade), will be held.  I will, of course, be attending that event, and will get you what pictures and/or video I can.  (Note that this time I was unable to rent the “lens of doom” due to monetary concerns, so the pictures won’t be as good; we are going as Press, which supposedly gives us a better photography location, so it may be OK.  We’ll see.)

The Hilton Pasadena looks to be a pretty reasonably sized facility to hold the number of people who attended PMX today; I didn’t feel overcrowded.  Some of their halls are somewhat narrow and twisty though, and may be hard to navigate for those with larger costumes or props.  However there seemed to be plenty of areas, both indoors and outdoors, that would serve as reasonable cosplay photography locations.  There are also some organizations offering free professionally shot cosplay photos however, so you might want to investigate that.  Also the one panel we did make it to (more on that below) was held in LP3, the Del Mar room, a rather smallish room (my guess is maybe 50 tops, a few more if they’re willing to crowd in).  This was fine for this particular panel, but we’ll have to see how this handles the greater crowds tomorrow.  (also I’m not sure how big the other rooms are in comparison)

The staff seemed to me to have a reasonably good attitude and were as helpful as they could be.  There were a few clueless ones (but you always get that no matter what con you’re at, so I can’t ding them for that).  But we got checked in and received our press badges in a pretty reasonable fashion.

The one panel we did manage to catch was on doll “face-ups,” a rather neat tie-in to our most recent episode. The panelist demonstrated what is involved in pulling off an effective face-up and gave some tips and techniques for achieving the best results.  Definitely informative, and really goes to show how creative the doll community is – face-ups are a lot of work!

I’ve posted what few pictures I took today (again, didn’t get to see much).  Looking forward to tomorrow!

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