After retrieving our Press passes, the first panel we decided to see was entitled “Kaiju and Art of Making Monsters”, with guest speaker Hideo Okamoto. I don’t know how many of you are monster movie fans, but I was stoked to see him. Okamoto has designed monsters for films like Godzilla vs. Destroyer, and the Mothra movies. We arrived a little late and missed a portion of it, but it was very exciting to see some of the sketches he had done for various anime and movies.

We then made our way to one of the main events of the day: The Cosplay Contest. Like I mentioned before, I’d never been to anything like this before, so I didn’t know what to expect. The first chunk of the contest consisted of various cosplayers catwalking on and off the stage. Some of them were obviously very impressive, while others really just looked like they could be picked up at a  Japanese 7-11. Though the cosplays were definitely awesome, the latter half of the contest was where things really picked up.

For me, the skits were really what it was all about. For the last 2 hours or so, the stage was graced with shakespearean tragedies, epic battles, truly random encounters and downright silliness. The skits definitely had a lot of surprises. It was very entertaining to see Sora embark on an adventure in search of Kairi, while bumping into familiar faces like Naruto, Snake, and even the hammer dude from Silent Hill. Another memorable scene was Master Chief hitting on Samus. That is quite a couple. It was pretty hilarious.

And the contest held even more surprises at the end! Nozomu Sasaki was there! As ClassicMoments has already posted, Nozomu Sasaki is a famous Japanese voice actor for such anime like Akira, Yu Yu Hakusho, Deathnote, and Rurouni Kenshin. At first, I didn’t recognize him, but when I heard that he had done the voice of Urameshi Yusuke, I was SO excited!

I was also very impressed with Mr. Sasaki. His English was excellent! It was actually funny because on stage were the two MCs introducing him, Nozomu Sasaki, and a lady in a suit. At first I figured she was the interpreter. But then Mr. Sasaki started speaking in English, and it was very very good. I suppose she might have been there just in case, but still, I felt kinda sorry for her, just standing there in her suit, with nothing to do.

Anyhoo, he performed two songs; one was the ending theme song to Yu Yu Hakusho, and another from an anime called Ushio to Tora. It was sweet.

After the Cosplay Contest, we decided to hit the streets!… of the Convention Center to scout some cosplayers!

Oh man. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I apologize for the absences. How’s everyone doing?? It’s freakin’ May already! I know it’s a little late, but here’  my post on Sakura-Con! I know our head honcho, ClassicMoments, has already posted most of the pictures, so I thought I would provide a little background story to them. I also thought (I did a lot of thinking) instead of making one LONG post, it might be easier to read it if I divided it into smaller posts. So here’s one!

First of all, let me tell you that this was my first Anime/Japan related convention ever. Actually, come to think of it, this was my first “convention” ever. Being brought up in Japan, I obviously grew up with anime and knew what cosplay was, but I never understood what people actually did when they suited up. Well I definitely got one answer: Hang out with other cosplayers!

As soon as we got off the freeway heading towards the Seattle Convention Center, we saw people in all sorts of cosplays out and about on the streets. It was quite a sight to see a horde of Konoha ninjas and Shinigamis eagerly waiting for the light to turn green. As I watched them cross the street in front of me, all I could think was “This is CRAZY!… and SWEET!”

By the time we made it to the Convention Center I was stoked. I was ready to embark on my journey into anime-fandom!

What’s CM Version?
Our editor, ClassicMoments (that’s me!) processes the pictures not as it should be, but how he wants it.

If you see yourself and want to get the original picture, just let us know by posting request on our forum.
Enjoy!

Cosplay, cospre, kosupure, コスプレ, 코스프레..
Whatever you want to call them, you got ‘em.

The quality of cosplay actually did surprise me, though I wish that the photoshoots were organized better. In fact, we couldn’t find many spots for photoshoots so we just walked around and throw my business cards as we take pictures of cosplayers. But in the end, it was all worth it.

These galleries so far are only half of the story. We got more pictures coming from my (Classic Moment’s) own taste of image processing, to be uploaded here in near future. We also gotta hear GillRider’s (one of our editor) side of story and his thoughts about Sakura-Con 2009. So keep your eyes on us until we poke ‘em hard!

Whew.
That’s a lot of pictures.
Let’s take some rest and ease our eyes.

On the left, that’s one of our editor, GillRider. I ‘think’ he’s available so if you’re interested, just let us know in the forum. We might charge $2.99 per minute for phone call though.

And in the middle left, of course, it’s hentai section we’ve found in exhibition hall. Gotta love ‘em, yeah?
On the middle right, it’s an awesome looking figure that we’ve found.
Finally, it’s the thingy that GillRider ordered. It’s huge and it satisfied him just right. Wait, did I just say that?

Last but not least, there were numbers of gaming sessions. You might find it funny that people would dress up, or pay good amount of money just so that they can play games on Sakura-Con, right? Yes, we agreed, but only until we saw an awesome “retro” room that had all the 8, 16, 32 and 64-bits love.

Chess, boring.
Cosplay Chess, awesome.
Simple as that.

To be 100% honest with you, I heard that the last year’s show was better, but I wouldn’t believe that statement (and still can’t) until many people agreed because this year’s show was awesome as crowd went wild. Not girls-gone-wild, but very close indeed.

Though it didn’t end how it’s suppose to end, we understand that playing plain chess is hard enough, so kudos for everyone who participated.

As we stated before, we were a bit late to the show, but we could still caught up to the good stuff.
We wished that the stage was cordinated better towards the press, so we could take better pictures for the stage.

If you see yourself, and don’t like it, blame the SC staff, ha! (J/K, you guys did okay..)

I didn’t witness 100% of the show, but I can surely tell you this; the performers and the crowd were lot more.. ‘pleasing’, or nicer than the most of the conventions I’ve visited. More enthusiastic, too. No matter how cheesy, bad, good or sometimes even boring it was, people cheered, and so did we.

After many processing ours and then restoring from the backups then processing again, we could finally start writing the coverage articles about Sakura-Con 2009, our first event coverage in 2009.

I’ll straighten up and admit it; we arrived at the SC a bit late.
But that didn’t stop us being there, and in fact, it didn’t stop anyone appearently.

I’m used to the larger conventions and expos so I expected many empty spaces, but I was wrong. There were more than enough cosplayers, gamers and exhibitors showing off their love to their passion.

Those lines for the attendance pass were actually formed many hours after the convention, but they all looked excited. Anywhere you go, many places were crowded.

We’ll start to upload the galleries in seconds.

First, we apologize for the late update about Sakura-Con 2009 coverage article.
We didn’t realize that processing 400+ images could be incredibly difficult on our mental health. And very physical too, since GR admin is whipping us down hard. Then our image editing software crashed then outside of our window, bunch of aliens abducted us then circus people had to save us from out of nowhere and.. That’s that.

Anyways, it’ll be updated ASAP, and here are some of the proof:

You might not like those heavily-processed images, but not too worry; alien told us that our visions will come back to normal soon. So hopefully our final pictures will look better (Or we’re suing those aliens!).

Stay close!

First of all, we’ve sent out all the pictures those were in request.
And sorry for us not updating on the Sakura-Con 2009 coverage.

Currently, we’re working with the webhosting company to see if we can upgrade our server to create our own forum (bbpress with our blog integration, so you don’t have to register twice for our website). We’re backing up all of our resources just in case the new server crashes our current website design.

So no worries, we’ll still post our coverage and pictures. Sorry for any inconvenience.

We’re back from Sakura-Con 2009!
And we’re dead tired.

If anyone wants to guess,  our editor -GillsRider- was the one who handed out my business card while I was taking your pictures with the our main camera. (Sorry, I was out of pockets; lame, I know..) But in the end, GillsRider took some awesome looking photos so we’ll make sure that his pictures are posted too.

As soon as we process your images, sort ‘em out, we’ll hand them back to you. (Or with your permission, it could be included on our gallery/coverage article.)

Thank you for being patient.

The schedule of programming and events for Sakura-Con 2009 is now available here. Be sure to check it out to make the most of your time at the convention.

http://www.sakuracon.org/schedule/SC2009_Schedule.pdf

We’ll all see you at the Sakura-Con 2009!