Supanova Perth 2009

I haven’t been to Supanova before, so I thought even though I am going to Japan very soon, I should go and see what it is like. Since I’m running low in time till I leave to Japan, I’ll try to minimise the text and let the photos do the explaining.

The event is a 3 day anime and sci-fi event, which starts with a Friday night session which involves meeting some famous actors, voice actors, charity anime auction, charity cosplayer slave auction and a screening of “5cm a second”.

Friday:

The Friday night was interesting, however I had a lot of trouble finding the venue of the event as all the lights were off, and there were no signs indicating where the convention was held. Fortunately with the help of a GPS, I was able to somewhat pinpoint the location of the event.

Entry involved swapping our tickets with some wrist bands that we had to wear ALL weekend. That wasn’t something I quite enjoyed since you’d be denied entry if the band was removed. (>_<)

Everything seemed good at first, but since the audio was really echoey, I couldn’t really make out what anyone on the stage was saying. In the end, it was quite hard to know what was going on.

Some famous actors, the first one is Anakin Skywalker from Star wars Episode 1, the other is an actor from Star Trek.

The charity anime goods auction and charity cosplayer slave auction.

I was really looking forward to the “5cm per second” screening, however, it seemed that they had two tiny projectors that displayed a rather blurred image, so I couldn’t enjoy the show. In addition, there were technical problem so there were no subtitles for the anime, which didn’t bother me, but it resulted in most of the people leaving early or hanging out and chatting in the corridor nearby.

Sneak peeks of the stalls being set up.

Saturday and Sunday:

The Saturday was much better and the queue to enter was quite long. It was interesting to all the different people in cosplay. I took a photo of most of the stalls at the event. I missed a few, but as you can tell from the beginning, my camera was simply taking so many blurred photos that most of them were unusable. Sunday was just a continuation of Saturday but with different events.

I won’t say much, but here are a few photos from Saturday and Sunday.

Stalls:

The registration desk

Tamarket, an online shop based in Melbourne

Ace Anime

Pinin from Melbourne

Tokyo Underground

Kings Comics

Wacom booth

Trading card Tournaments WA

Wrestling

501st Legion

Artists Alley

The shopping was quite good there, and there were a few good bargains available, but it seemed that most of the items were not really discounted at all which was a disappointment. All the anime figures were aroung $150-$200 each and since I wasn’t into the discounted English mangas, I didn’t find too much that interested me in the shopping.

As for the scheduled events at the convention, I saw the anime related ones which were okay, but the venue simply was too small, so it was very difficult to see the stage and it was very crowded.

Cosplay:

As for the cosplay and the cosplay competition, it was all very good and enjoyable, however it was so crowded I couldn’t really see the stage properly and the lighting was bad, so my camera couldn’t take many decent shots.

Cosplay Competition entrees

Random Cosplay photos

Loot:

In regard to shopping, I took a few pics of the stuff I ended up buying after 3 days of the convention. Despite many stalls not really discounting the goods, I did end up buying quite a bit of stuff. I got the 12 Kingdoms DVDs on discount, although I am missing volume 8 which I need to complete the set. Apart from that, I got a couple of anime files (Negima and Getsumen Tou Heiki Meena), a He is my master pencil board, a couple of trading figures, some posters, anime promo dvd, post cards and magazines.

In conclusion, I think I enjoyed Waicon better than this event, but still found that I enjoyed myself over the weekend. Looking back, there was a lot of interesting things going on, but I think I missed out in a lot of them as I didn’t plan what to do in the event properly. Next time I will attend more of the seminars which apparently were quite good compared to the anime events which were a bit disappointing.