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Chase Wang on Anime Expo 2007

anybody remembers when Tsukasa hojo, nobuhiro watsuki, Inoue Kikuko and Yuu watase were all UNDER THE SAME ROOF? and for a minimal $25.00 ticket or free you could approach the stage and shake hands with them?

Where is THAT anime expo eh?

There were so many people crossing the street illegally; I'm glad no one got hit (that I know of).

How would you, personally, characterize this year's AX?

I think overall it was a very good year. It was definitely a learning experience for the industry, for the staff, and for myself. It's definitely a learning process, one I think will continue every year.

Well, it's been in Long Beach before.

True, but you have to understand that the staff then was different from the staff now; for the people on board now, Long Beach was a new experience. We have some retention in the staff, but the majority of the people here now weren't here years ago when the show was in Long Beach.

Learning process? everybody at the anime expo was giving excuses like that, it is a new convention now?

“but when they were doing the Haruhi dance on stage, the show was well-received. People were cheering and screaming. From my experience in the audience, I mean, it seemed like a positive thing.”

“It was an exclusive world premiere, and from my understanding of it, the majority of the concertgoers felt it was worth the wait. These may have been extreme fans, but I think seeing these J-Rock gods smash their instruments on stage may have excited the crowd even more.”

As for food, a huge amount of restaurants with a variety of price ranges was directly across the street from the main convention center. Those of you complaining about lack of food in the area, have you been to AX in Anaheim before? There's a pizza place and a crappy Chinese food place that are further away than the restaurants were in Long Beach. There is an IHOP close by that charges $10 for a plate of pancakes, and there are one or two fast food places about a quarter of a mile away. Everything in the area is absurdly expensive with the exception of the pizza place I mentioned earlier. The food choice and pricing in Long Beach was infinitely better than those in Anaheim.

xstylus
PostPosted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:08 am Post subject:
I'm a staffer, but not a manager, so my word isn't exactly qualifiable as official (thus I must give the disclaimer: my opinion is my own, not Expo's). I don't sit in on any meetings, so I'm just an armchair quarterback too.

In my view, Chase said everything there was to say, and said it very well. The best of preparations were made, yet as he said, things happened that couldn't have been predicted. What more did he need to say?

I'm sure you would have preferred more detail, but it's irrelevant because the bottom line is that the ultimate responsibility falls to Expo. It falls on them again to do better for next year, which means being better prepared for the unpredictable. As Chase said, it's a learning experience. I'm still proud of this convention, and remain proud to help.

How about you? I know quite a few people who joined because they felt Expo could be better, and it indeed has become better with them, but I also know they sing a different tune now than before they were on staff. I can't tell you how much it hurts to hear someone say that staffers such as myself didn't try hard enough for this event. I can only imagine how the managers feel.

testor: You'd have to pay for transportation there anyway. Hell, you'd have to take a taxi, or be gouged at the pump, if you flew into Anaheim. Anyway, it's still cheaper than the con food.

Hayate:

Quote:

As for food, a huge amount of restaurants with a variety of price ranges was directly across the street from the main convention center. Those of you complaining about lack of food in the area, have you been to AX in Anaheim before? There's a pizza place and a crappy Chinese food place that are further away than the restaurants were in Long Beach. There is an IHOP close by that charges $10 for a plate of pancakes, and there are one or two fast food places about a quarter of a mile away. Everything in the area is absurdly expensive with the exception of the pizza place I mentioned earlier. The food choice and pricing in Long Beach was infinitely better than those in Anaheim.

What?! But everything those Anaheim-lovers say must be true!

testor: You'd have to pay for transportation there anyway. Hell, you'd have to take a taxi, or be gouged at the pump, if you flew into Anaheim. Anyway, it's still cheaper than the con food.

In regards to the staff, most shows of your size are handled by professionals for whom running a convention, maintaining a convention and staffing a convention is their full-time job. Anime Expo still operates with a volunteer staff, and even a board of directors where the show isn't their full-time job. Do you feel AX has outgrown that method and that it's about time to move on to a more professional level of operation? Is bringing in a full-time professional staff something that AX is looking at?

From my perspective, I don't think that's a wise way to move forward.

Why not?

It's a fan-driven convention. Fans know what they want to see, they know what kind of programming they want. For instance, this year we had the first Otaku Parliamentary Debate. To me, that's brilliant; I'd never have come up with that. And it's because we have real fans on the staff. An outsider coming in just to run a show would forget what the fans want, and AX would become a cookie-cutter show, not as tailored to fan taste as it is now.

Tokyopop didn't have a booth, but they had multiple panels and portfolio reviews and whatnot. They've been diminishing booth presence at most of the shows I've seen them at over the years so it didn't seem relevant.

The con's grown exponentially, and we understand that. One of the things we learned in 2007 was that we need to train our volunteer staff more. Maybe give them cheat sheets so they know where everything is at all times. We need to give them more tools and more training, and that's one of the things we'll be working on in 2008.

Maybe we need to alter our programming, so things end at a certain time at the LACC, and everything else happens at the hotels after hours, and maybe we'll have shuttles for fans to get to those hotels. And I'm not talking about little tiny shuttles, I'm talking big buses, to take care of people with large costumes. We want to make this experience as positive as possible for the attendees.

So why not just change the weekend and book up the next half-decade?

Well, the difficulty of that is that historically, AX has always been the 4th of July weekend. Everyone usually has an extra day off, and it's a 4-day show, so that helps too.

San Diego Comic-Con is four and a half days and has never relied on a holiday weekend to bring in droves of people.

Well, that's comparing apples and oranges, I think.

And face it. A fan gathering is 10,000, maybe 20,000. Bigger than that, they really need to change the way they are looking at this. I really think that't their biggest issue-the need to accept they aren't a little gathering of anime fans & accept they are a major event & major events require planning. It's th3 whole small-town approach--San Diego for years fought the fact we're one of the biggest cities inthe US & kept thinking sleepy navy town & we're now dealing with things many cities much smaller than we are have planned for like a decent public transportation system(ours reeks). In the '70's, these issues would have much easier to plan for than playing fix-gap now. AX needs to deal with these issues now so they can have better cons in the future unless they want someone else (like New York or Otakon) to steal their thunder & become the big anime con every year because at some point people are going to get tired of all this.