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September Weekend Author's Notes 2004 For the second time in 2004, this site traveled to two conventions on a single weekend. This time it was a couple of brief, one-day stays at Nan Desu Kan  and AnimeIowa, just enough time to take some pictures, chat with a couple of the guests of honor, and then move on. Why? Because organizers of the two events asked the author of this web site to help out, and this writer didn't want to disappoint anyone. Nan Desu Kan asked the author to stage a panel discussion on cosplay trends, and AnimeIowa wanted the author to help judge the Saturday night costume contest. So the author packed an extra bag with his collection of costuming pictures and headed to the airport. As always, Nan Desu Kan got off to a quiet Friday start. Since it was a school day, the convention didn't get busy until classes let out and the crowds started to gather. Still, by mid-afternoon, registration lines extended across the entire east face of the convention halls that the convention used. That quiet start meant only a half-dozen people were on hand for the author's panel, but it wasn't a dull event. Those fans spent the hour looking through the author's costuming pictures and talking about the the outfits they remembered from previous years. One of those fans, who created the Rita Repulsa costume that was well-received in 2003, was in a Naruto outfit for 2004, part of the year's Naruto costuming trend. The other trends are Final Fantasy, the growing number of costumers and the youth of those costumers. What started as a college students' hobby has spread to junior high school students, and that Naruto costumer is unusual in being 58 years old. For those who remember the impressive manga Spawn outfit from 2003, the man who made that costume was back, apologetic that he had not been able to finish an even more fearsome Predator costume for  2004. Just a couple of more weeks, he said as he stood around in street clothes for once. Nan Desu Kan has gotten just about all of the use they can get out of the Aurora, Colo. Holiday Inn where they've been housed for the last three years, so they're headed to a new facility in 2005. (Yes, it's in Aurora, not Denver. Because of airport annexations, the Denver line is right across the street from the Holiday Inn.) There was a J-pop singer at Nan Desu Kan, but we were told by the convention staff that the group that brought her to Colorado didn't want any pictures taken of her. After we got that straightened out, we used the extra Friday night time to chase down more costumers who are interested in appearing in the Japanese cosplay book from Studio Do-Do. There were several Colorado costumers interested in the Japanese book, including an entire Sailor Moon group that gathered on Friday evening. The odd part of the Colorado hotel stay was getting a top-floor room next to one of the loudspeakers for the building's anti-nuisance bird system. It squawks like a raptor that's supposed to scare starlings and pigeons, but it's somewhere between bizarre and annoying for humans. Fortunately, the hotel shut the thing off at night, but they started it back up at six in the morning. The site's author already was awake by that time on Saturday, ready to roll to the Denver airport for the trip to Des Moines and AnimeIowa. The trip wasn't early enough for the author's tastes, making him miss Saturday's only appearance by Japanese artist Kia Asamiya - the main disappointment of the weekend. More rewarding was the number of people in Des Moines who wanted to participate in the Japanese cosplay book project. The convention was kind enough to let the author yell the information at the costume contest audience, and quite a few people responded by seeking out the writer (who was easy to spot in his purple Hoosier Racing Tire shirt). At one point it was like a little assembly line, with costumers signing in at one end and posing for pictures at the other end. That session came after one of the author's occasional stints as a costume contest judge. Many costumers wonder what goes through a judge's mind, and here's a chance to learn. This writer was one of three judges for the AnimeIowa event, joined by Erika Door, the previous year's best of show winner, who wore a wonderful self-made gothic lolita-style dress, and Scott, a sci-fi costuming veteran who dressed as a mad scientist of the kind you would have seen in one of the Universal horror movies of the 1930's, complete with metal hat. Scott wasn't familiar with anime characters but he did know costuming, which made his a valuable outside voice. There was a separate workmanship judge who viewed the entries before the stage presentations and chose three winners in advance, and it was decided early that the rest of the awards would come from those who didn't get the workmanship prizes, avoiding the potential conflict of giving an entry more than one award. Also, there was the AnimeIowa classification system, where the entrants were assigned to the "sempai" group for experienced costumers and "kohai" group for those with less experience. The number of awards was limited to eight, with no judges' awards or novelty prizes, which turned out the be the correct number for this event. This author finds that his personality changes when he switches from being a costuming photographer to serving as a judge. The mind becomes far more critical and he seeks out flaws in the outfits and stage performances that don't matter in the hallways. From the mind of this judge, it was obvious that the AnimeIowa contest wasn't going to set any new standards for performances, and that it was going to be best to judge the entries only on the costumes. The best of a variable lot of stage presentations was a Naruto group where everyone fell down and the little kid won at the end, so that might have seemed to be the best group...but we ranked them as the best of the "kohai" category, opening that group award for a Gravitation pair and reasoning that two people was large enough in this case for a "group." The last entry of the night, a Last Exile costumer, got the Prestige award (this event's "best of show") for her commanding demeanor during her brief stage presentation as well as her costume. Next best individual costume was a Sailor Moon costumer, so that person got best group. We chose to give a group of pretty Paradise Kiss costumes, some of which have been seen before at Midwestern events, the best "sempai" award for experienced costumers. And one case where the costume was better than the stage presentation was a Snow Fairy Sugar performer whose violin playing on stage was off key, but the costume was good enough for second place in the "kohai" less-experienced group. AnimeIowa's costume contest entrants weren't the best of the season, and there were some people seen in the halls that would have leapt past the entrants and gotten prizes had they entered. But the number of entrants was another indication that costuming is an exceptionally popular part of the conventions that this site attends. September 2004 Main Page