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Otakon Author's Notes - 2003 Anime convention fandom gets a little more intense each year. The crowds get larger and younger, the events grow larger and busier. Five years earlier, when this site was making its first tour of anime conventions, Otakon was considered a big event because it drew 2,500 people. In 2003, the East Coast show had grown six times as large. There were more people in the main events ballroom for Saturday concerts and the costume contest than attended the entire convention in the year that "A Fan's View" got started. The entire floor plan of the hotel where Otakon was held in 1998 would have fit into the area where the 2003 dealers' room was located, with room to spare. The area used for the whole 1998 convention was about the same space used for the 2003 artists' alley. What filled a couple of 1998 hotels needed a dozen places to hold all of the fans who attended in 2003. And the growth seems to attract fans, rather than driving them away. Like the attraction of big-time sports like NASCAR races or the NFL, success breed success and a demand for more of everything. What leads so many people to want to go to anime conventions? The events let people become something they could never be in everyday, mundane life. They get a chance to act out their fantasies as cosplayers, become the ultimate critic in the video rooms, or pursue dreams of success in the artists' alley. Where real life can drive fans down, anime conventions elevate them, and that's the real attraction. In the same way, anime attracts fans because of the power of the strong, vibrant stories told by the filmmakers. A great example of the power of fiction came on the author's flight home from Otakon. He was sitting across a flight attendant who occupied a jump seat. As the flight approached the Pittsburgh airport, the attendant glanced at a paperback novel she was reading. A look of shock came over her face and she said "Oh my gosh!" Something in that novel had affected the flight attendant as much as if it had happened in real life. It was the same sort of reaction you'll see from anime fans as they see the latest episode of their favorite series. Of course, the fun starts only if you can get to an event. On the weekend before Otakon, the author was all ready to race across town to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Brickyard 400, the season's biggest stock car race. He dumped his equipment in the trunk, slid behind the wheel and turned the key. Two groans, then silence. Dead alternator and drained battery. Not enough time to get a replacement before the race started. The only consolation was that the failure didn't come a week earlier, when the author put 450 miles on the car, rushing between conventions in Indianapolis and Cincinnati. The closest the author got to the racetrack was to a garage a mile away, where he stood the day after the 400 as a delivery truck arrived. The driver handed a box to a mechanic, and out of the box came a bright, shiny new AC Delco alternator. The part was immediately bolted into the engine compartment of the author's car, joining the new drive belt that had just been installed. "This one won't squeak like the bad one did," said the mechanic as he tightened the bolts. So now you get an idea why the author was so eager to get out of town for Baltimore and Otakon. After missing Anime Expo because of a shortage of cash that would have left the author scrounging for sleeping space and food, the author had a deal to get him to Otakon - and things worked out. Ironically, the author was expected to videotape the Saturday night costume contest with a borrowed DV camera, but his assistant ended up operating that gadget, leaving the author free to get the digital stills of the contest that were posted on this site. The totals (and you'd be surprised to know how many people asked the author abut this): 4,550 pictures taken over three days of the convention, of which 1,395 were posted to this site, of which 1,252 were cosplay pictures. It's not a brag - other web sites post far more pictures from conventions such as Otakon, and one fan had a goal of taking more pictures than this author. What this site is fairly good at achieving is in getting pictures online fast. Nearly all of the pictures were uploaded through the author's 3G cell phone, which allowed reasonably fast wireless Internet access in an area with no WiFi. One fan asked why the web site pictures have gotten so small over the last couple of  years. That's for usability and practicality. The smaller the picture files, the faster they load. And smaller files keep the site from exceeding the 100 GB monthly file transfer limit. That volume of pictures won't be taken unless there is something to see, and Otakon was flooded with costumers. For all of those images, the author would be surprised if he saw as many as half of the convention's cosplayers. Out of the 17,000 people who attended the convention, the proportion of costumers seems to have increased over the years, and there are too many to catch, considering the author's habits of bouncing back and forth between panel discussions and the search for costumers. When people saw the author, after they asked him why he wasn't at Anime Expo (no money), whether he would be going to Shoujocon (no, to AnimeIowa that same weekend) and why he wasn't around to take pictures of their best costumes. The author's relentless wandering and the convention's size kept that from happening...although he wondered if there was a different way to handle things. Instead of going from place to place, should the author just find one place to stay for the weekend, publicize that in advance and have costumers come to him for pictures? Might he buy another printer and revive the 2002 picture-sale experiment? That's tempting, but there's still a big part of the author's mind that says it's more fun to ramble around a convention than to sit in one place. Certainly if the author had been stuck in one location at Otakon, he would have missed the Kristine Sa and TM Revolution concerts. A sign of the popularity of singer TM Revolution: on the day after his concert, this site got two E-mail messages thanking the author for posting pictures of the show. Both messages came from Japanese fans. One said she had wanted to travel all the way from Japan to Maryland to see TM, but wasn't able to make the trip. After TM's third song, when the picture-taking limit was reached, the author rushed out of the hall so he could process the concert images and get them online as fast as possible. On the way out, he saw that everyone in the crowd was standing. The author hasn't seen anything like than since a stock car race at Daytona, where everyone stood when the green flag fell. TM's show had all of the power, energy and volume of a NASCAR 500-miler, concentrated on a concert stage rather than spread over a superspeedway. At the convention, the author encountered dub producers who were known to be looking for work. Jeff Thompson, who made his reputation on The Right Stuf projects such as Boogie Pop Phantom, said he's still searching for a production job. However, producer Scott Houle appears to have landed on his feet. Wearing one of his old Coastal Studios T-shirts, Houle was handing out business cards for his new venture with Phoenix Post Sound, which will be located at the Blue Ridge Motion Pictures studio. Houle said he'll be handling that studio's ADR, mixing and sweetening work, and hopes to get some anime dubbing jobs in the future. Houle said it's still tough to get those dubbing contracts because anime importers can choose from several dub production houses, and thosr houses bid against each other for contracts. Director Pamela Weidner wasn't able to get to Otakon, but actors Mandy Bonhomme and Johnny Yong Bosch were on hand. So why isn't there anything about those personalities in this site's reports? The Saturday voice acting panel was scheduled for the evening, at the same time the author had to get ready for the costume contest. The panel discussion for character designer Tsukasa Kotobuki, a favorite of the author's for his art and comments on the industry, was scheduled around the same time. And the panel for Love Hina anime director Yoshiaki Iwasaki was held at the same time as the big Saturday afternoon concert. All of which further damages the belief that the author of this page can be at two places at the same time. Otakon had a great collection of guests from Japan, the U.S. and Canada. It had a surprisingly large number of fans from New York and Calfornia. Lots of people have been at other conventions during the season, such as the guitar player who had done his Dark Chocobo-as-Jimi Hendrix costume contest act at Anime Boston. But, even with those personalities, the cosplayers were among Otakon's biggest stars. Cosplay is just the part of conventions that most people can understand - colorful and exotic, great stuff to photograph. That message was hammered home on the convention's Saturday when people picked up the Baltimore Sun: on the front page, above the fold, was a big color picture of a young woman in an Earth Girl Arjuna costume from Otakon. It was the first thing that hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers saw in Baltimore and the surrounding region, and it referred readers to a story on Otakon - which concentrated solely on the convention's cosplayers. Otakon remains the biggest event at the Baltimore Convention Center. Other events come close - the Firehouse Expo firefighting trade show, held two weeks earlier, drew 15,000 people - but Otakon remains the largest. The convention center is a great match for the convention, giving events the space they need. It's big and spread out over two city blocks, and the center is so large that pigeons and sparrows were flying around the interior. But the hundreds of thousands of square feet mean fans aren't crowded. One place where the space was welcome was on the ground floor level, an area which became the cosplay groups' gathering place. Hundreds of fans could mill about that area, posing and taking pictures, and they were certain not to get in anyone's way (as long as they stayed clear of the end of the escalator). The other big area was used for the dealers' room, one of the largest of its kind. There was so much space that the biggest anime companies were able to set up their huge trade-show displays for fans. The Pioneer booth, which once was considered big for anime conventions, was dwarfed by the ADV Films display and its lighted arch. But even ADV was a little smaller than the massive Bandai area, marked by scoreboard-sized banners and separate sales areas for Bandai videos, toys and model kits. The anime convention's size makes it an important event for Baltimore, since the convention center hasn't attracted the number of major events that its promoters expected when it was expanded  in 1997. To solve that, there's been serious talk about constructing a big convention hotel on the parking lot just west of the convention center and north of Oriole Park. However, Baltimore's big drawback against conventions remains the city's reputation, and competition from Washington to the south and Philadelphia to the north. Both of those competing cities have larger facilities than Baltimore can offer, although they don't have the neat attractions that people can find in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. A story in the Baltimore Sun showed how important events are to that convention center. They made a big fuss over a February gathering of the American Society of Association Executives that promised to attract 700 people and use 80,000 square feet of convention center space. It seemed big to the newspaper, but you could drop that show of that size into the middle of Otakon and the anime fans would barely know it was there. The Otakon dealers' room takes up around 50,000 square feet. The executives' convention will use only half of the ballroom's 36,000 square feet, while Otakon used every inch. The newspaper story also said the February group would "generate at least $689,000 in direct spending." That got the author to thinking how much Otakon was worth to Baltimore. If the convention draws 17,000 people, if half of those people stay in hotels (let's guess that there's a lot of room sharing), and if those people buy meals for a couple of days, let's estimate a rough figure of $2.5 million in lodging and meals. Add the money spent on memberships, in the dealers' room and artists' alley, and for miscellaneous stuff around Baltimore, and you could come up with a safe estimate of $4 million spent by Otakon fans. Otakon fans will be glad to know that their event isn't the only fandom event where people face long lines to get in. Two weeks earlier, at the Gen Con Game Fair in Indianapolis, the convention owner had to apologize on their web site for the at-site registration lines which extended for hundreds of feet, stretching outside the Indiana Convention Center. Gen Con had a computerized system that slowed the registration process. Before you think "Haven't we heard that story before," understand that, according to the Gen Con web site, the convention also had a virus on the LAN that included the registration system. The convention owner wrote in his apology that the LAN was connected to the Internet, that someone managed to download some porn on the system, and that may have triggered a virus that nearly shut down the convention's registration. Otakon had no such problem. The convention had huge registration lines on Friday morning which stretched outside the building, but after they melted away, the lines were manageable for the rest of the weekend. And at the end of the show, the convention maintained its tradition of handing out their unused badge forms for their anime artwork. The author still wishes that the Baltimore Convention Center didn't scoot everyone out of the place by 4:30 on Sunday afternoon, even if it gave the author a reason to stroll to the Harborplace food court for large amounts of breaded shrimp. Just before the show closed, Otakon announced that they'll return to the Baltimore Convention Center in 2004, on July 30-Aug. 1. Panels Pictures