Salt Lake Comic Con, Sept 2014. Salt Lake City Utah.
Let’s first say that the preparation for this convention goes beyond fans. The event itself was in fact overwhelming and awesome. Because of the anticipation of the size of the event, C.R.S and I applied and got accepted to be members of the press. This just allowed us entry into any of the public panels, press conferences and we carried our gear with us like a mother bear would carry its cub. Any of the events that we up-charged, like Stan Lee‘s event, Hulk Hogan we did not attend. However we did attend a very exciting event Saturday night (more on that later).
Thursday 04-Sept:
Thursday’s events started at 2pm for the general public, we however with press credentials in hand were able to make entry at 11am to have a blast recording some video shows and tons of photos! Thank you to Dan Farr productions, Salt Lake Comic Con and SnappConner PR for the invite.
Hit the ground running, and have your camera crash! Yes this happened not from a fall but during the 50 mins of video recording of the press conference something went down with the firmware on our main camera, which was recording video! When 4pm rolled around and I tried to archive our footage to my laptop I noticed that all the video files were time stamped 4:11 pm. Holy crap, well most of the video is gone for Thursday, what we do have we will publish for the best of Comic Con videos on our youtube channel at http://youtube.com/iscifitv
The events during the press conference were surreal to be honest. All these stars in one place, the energy. The emotions were overpowering seeing children from Make a wish foundation as well as members from H.E.R.O.E.S INC (a local COS play group that does so many charity works).
Crowds were bad outside as lines went around the block, and for those that don’t know how huge that is. Well its two city blocks wide! Some very negitive and NSFW comments about this were posting everyone on SaltLakeComicCon.com site as well as Facebook and twitter. We wont echo that garbage, but we did see there was a traffic control problem with getting people in and out of the Salt Palace. We too got stuck in lines, and just because we had on a press pass doesn’t make us ELITE to push through the lines, but *cough there were others (non press) that sure as hell did that.
Okay good times! hit the floor and WOW! so many booths setup in Artist alley, vendors as well (by the way a toy vendor that sells knocks off its not a artist!!!). The wrestling ring in the middle of the two sections was a dumb move, because come Sat with a full crowd this lead to bottleneck of people and total frustration!
We meet with Ronnie Hansen from Monsterhedz.com at his booth. Talking about a trip seeing his artwork of orc heads mounted all of which we did by hand and not copying anyone elses style. Check his work out at his website as well.
4pm Zombie Rock Opera. Yes! you read that correct!!! It was a packed room of a few hundred people, hosted by our friend and author Paul Genesse. This was so cornball silly you couldnt help but laugh as he narrated the story will guest in room came up front to play parts in this opera. All was well until… yes the nuclear bomb sounds was my damn phone ringing when the hero was being attacked at the end. It lead to a uproar of laughter and applause. I dropped the damn phone in my attempt to press stop. Needless to say it made it on the audio. You will get to listen to that too. Just following our rants and posts for more on that topic.
Pictures flying (not knowing my camera was hosed, but managed to snap over 150!).
Just so cool to see so many people dressed up in costume, laughing, singing and total fun.
By 5:30pm C.R.S and Mr Hack were done. Spent dead tired and wiped out.. Thursday was just a half day but wow!
Segments from press conference will be posted separately as well. Thank you again for a awesome day. Next comes friday…
Friday 05-Sept :
Not to sound like a broken record, the crowds grew. So did the negative comments, however by mid day the place was packed and no many people actually outside in a ‘line’.
C.R.S had it planned out, attend some panels in the BallRoom , record video segments, hit the floor , get autographs, work our way back to the front and hit some panels. HA. she was great, however things too a awesome twist with those plans.
We had a interview setup to meet with the cast and or crew of Evil Dead the Musical Ultimate 4D experience, whom hails from Las Vegas! We were going to meet at 1pm, but moved it to 5pm so they could practice since this was their first time as the cast and stage to be in SLC and on the road. SIRC MICHAELS PRODUCTIONS is a awesome guy to bring his crazy ass crew to Salt Lake Comic Con. Rumor has it they wanted to use 20 gallons of blood in the splatter zone. Well bull, its was more and C.R.S and I got soaked too when we attended satuday night and not a press as paying customers!
We circled the floor, got 100s of photos, I spent hundreds of dollars on photo ops with stars, autographs and stuff. It was all worth it. This time the camera behaved! thanks to my hacking abilities and some software tweaks on the SD cards we have over 5 hours of video from friday to get out the door. After all the photos, chats, interviews and mileage Mr Hack goes offline around 6. Back to hotel to decompress and get ready for satuday.
Saturday 06-Sept:
Crowds? Oh hell yes. SOLD OUT! SOLD OUT. With a legal (based on Salt Lake County Fire code), the salt palace max is 80,000 people. Salt Lake Comic con had over 90,000. This lead to closing the doors for several mins to have a one out the door, one in the door. Don’t blame the con, blame yourself! This is awesome that Salt Lake sold out the entire Salt Palace convention center! That being said C.R.S and I stayed inside, due to the risk of leaving for lunch and being barred entry and miss out of photos or video segments.
We hit artist alley hard on sat. We bought some books, did random videos with authors and burned up most of the day walking in circles. This was a huge day but that damn westing ring I mention because the bane of everyone. Again I wont post the NSFW comments but let’s say they were accurate as to the traffic flow issues it caused.
Spock, Mr Spock? 4pm Leonard Nimoy himself joined the grand (south) ballroom via skype. Live long and AWESOME!
More money spent, more stuff to hang on the wall. More video and audio to post. Whoo hoo we made it..
…
NOT SO fast. We still had to have the blood letting at 10pm as partons of The Evil Dead the musical which was hosted as the Fallout (dark underbody of 600 south and 600 west). Perfect for a community theature setting. The best part was our SPLAT tickets got us front room, and by front row I mean. My knee touched the stage. C.R.S made tee shirts for us THEY GOT US, but because of SPLAT we other got white tee’s. They were not white for long.
OMG The chin himself Bruce ‘ash’ Campbell opened the show with a dialog asking for the Mormons to pray, and to make sure they have their faith tested. Laughing our asses off and several F*Bombs dropped. This was going to be awesome. It sure was. Soak with blood (red koolaid from the likes of it) . The con was over, the boomstick was unloaded and we had a blast.
SUMMARY:
Crowd and over booking. Fix it. it’s our 2nd year. We (SLC) will get better. The floor layout with panels needs to be more logical (put all the simlar panels next to each other not on other sides of the convention center), no westing ring in the center where the two sections meet. Wider isles so artist alley isn’t a shove fest. People! need to learn some tact. Since we had PRESS passes and our website logo on everything I was not going to stoop to your level and push and shove.
So many people, so much talent we say in both costume and the volunteers. SLCC 2015 is going to rock
Coming up YOUTUBE videos of everything we saw! not all at once as it would be an entire day of you sitting on you butt watching iscifi.tv :D
Follow us on Facebook , Google+, Twitter, and our own webiste (duh you are all ready here).
Peace out. live long and i-SCI-fi
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