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I didn't get a chance to get over to the Masquerade this year, again. I was wondering whether the Arena experiment worked for this year. HOw full was it? Could people see and hear? Those sort of things.

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I'd say that from a technical standpoint, the idea was a success. The arena seemed to be somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 full, and I'm sure that relieved a lot of crowd control pressure on the BCC. I had one of the seats on the side, and I could see the stage itself, along with the video on the two screens on the side of the stage. I think the video crew did a great job of choosing which camera to display and when.

Let me preface the next bit with this statement: I have a lot of respect for anyone who can work up the nerve to get on stage and perform in front of an audience, especially one the size of the masquerade audience. But with that understanding, I left the masquerade with a profound sense of disappointment. With the possible exception of the "Street Fighter Revival" skit, every act left me either a) scratching my head wondering if I had missed the joke, or :) wondering if this act had gone a lot better in one of the practice or rehearsal runs. In hindsight, it seemed like some of the acts were just plain dwarfed by the sheer size of the stage.

In addition, this was more personally disappointing to me because my first con experience with cosplay/masquerade at Katsucon 2005, where I was just completely blown away by the entire experience. Maybe it was because I was backstage and could see everything so closely, but as much as I was agog at the Katsucon cosplay, I was dumbfounded at how lackluster this year's masquerade was.

For future masquerades, I would like to humbly suggest:

1) Especially for musical numbers, practice, practice, practice! Play the song until you don't need the sheet music any more. Then play it until your fingers bleed. Then play it until you hate it and never want to hear it again. If there's dialogue involved, know your lines backwards and forwards. Know everyone else's lines as well. If the dialogue is all pre-recorded, know your lines like Ashlee Simpson knows her songs.

2) If your skit leans more towards comedy, make sure your jokes are generic enough that people can understand them without having to have seen every single episode twice as well as read all the databooks. Everyone can laugh at a peeping tom ninja, but only a select few know that Jiraiya is the author of "Flirting Paradise". If you are going to go for "in" jokes, try to intersperse them with generic jokes that won't leave the entire audience left out. Have an outside third party review your material and see what works and what doesn't.

3) If you're going to propose to someone and feel compelled to do it at Otakon, DON'T DO IT ON STAGE UNLESS YOU'RE PROPOSING TO ALL OF US or at least inviting us all to the reception.

I know this got a little off topic from the original question, but of all the things about this year's Otakon that needed improvement, this is the one that stuck out the most to me.

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I thought the masquerade was alright this year. There was the usual mix of the outstanding and the blah. At first I was a little annoyed with them moving the main event from it's usual place on the fourth floor of the convention center, but I quickly changed my mind when I saw how easily we all fitted in there. I was in the 11th row from the very front! I couldn't believe how much space and feedom to move around there was, it was definately a great idea to move it.

The best skit was hands down the Street Fighter one, those guys must study martial arts or parkour or something because they had those moves down. I really enjoyed the violin playing young asian man who kept dropping his sheet music, and the dancing Sora and Riku were awesome (at one point they danced to 'I like Big Butts' :D ). There also was a cute naruto one about a dream he had where a Katamari chased him that was pretty good. Some of my friends performed a Kingdom Hearts battle that was alright, but in retrospect they probably could have stood a bit more practice and better music (sorry guys, I do think it had potential though). The one were Faye Valentine and the other rejected lovers of Anime danced was quite good. The Inu Yasha one where Kagome turned into a Hanyou and kissed him was good (if for no other reason than that fans of Inu Yasha have been waiting for that forever ^_^).

The thing I didn't like was that this year there were alot of 'skits' that weren't really skits. I mean, singing is all well and good maybe once or twice, but there were too many musical acts this year. If you're going to do a musical act, combine it with a story like the people who did X did a while back. And there were way, way, way, WAY too many bleach skits this year! There needs to be a limit on how many people can do the same anime because after a while I was just plain fed up with them. Bleach is all well and good but I certainly didn't need to watch an hour block of mediocre bleach skits (even if the costumes were very nice guys).

As for the guy who proposed, congratulations on your engagement! I thought that was really sweet (although I was very confused about what was going on until the announcer told us it was the real deal).

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Well, I must say, there were quite a few really good skits this year. I was scoring coordinator, so I was sitting at the judges table, and let me tell you, they actually had a hard time with a few awards this year! lol

As per the "only allow a certain number of skits from a series"...well, the problem with that could be we might end up short on skits XD

(I kid, I seriously hope that would never be the case)

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And there were way, way, way, WAY too many bleach skits this year! There needs to be a limit on how many people can do the same anime because after a while I was just plain fed up with them. Bleach is all well and good but I certainly didn't need to watch an hour block of mediocre bleach skits (even if the costumes were very nice guys).
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Aww thanks Moo_Moo it is appriciated that you liked ours, even if just a little. I can tell you the lumping of skits was something that was talked about backstage and in the green room and is still being discussed on Cosplay.com. The overall agreement seems to be that noone liked it since we were afraid of the overkill effect it would have. Hopefully one of those things that can be looked into for next year or such.

And yeah I wasn't personally at the masquerade last year, but I did get to see those skits, and have heard talk about it. If anything needed to be broken up it was those two, definitely a shame they put them on one after the other.

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And there were way, way, way, WAY too many bleach skits this year! There needs to be a limit on how many people can do the same anime because after a while I was just plain fed up with them. Bleach is all well and good but I certainly didn't need to watch an hour block of mediocre bleach skits (even if the costumes were very nice guys).

Being the Rude from skit number 13, Soul Society News, and the last one in the "Bleach Block" I can tell you our group was kinda worried about this. You seem to forget though, that the groups don't all sit down and go, "Hey, I'm doing a skit from (blank anime) how about you guys try to avoid that one?". Also popularity is going to have some focus on what is done. I'm expecting to see quite a few more "Snakes on a Plane" type skits, sinply because it's being talked about and so on. *shrugs* I do think they could have tried to spread them out instead of grouping them all together, that in and of itself was our groups biggest worry as we were coming at the tail end. The only thing that we hoped helped in ours was that while it was a "Bleach skit" we did have our headline girl Yukari from Paradise Kiss (Kadioh Kio on Cosplay.com), our weather girl Shiva from Final Fantasy (final_memories on Cosplay.com), and me from FFVII AC (same id on Cosplay.com). The only Bleach caracters were actually Urahara (Tess on Cosplay.com) and Soi Fong (Mistress_Aine on Cosplay.com). Between that and the "news" being pulled from many different anime sources we kinda hoped we would give a nice transition out of the Bleach stuff. Sorry if you didn't like it though. :D

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Aww thanks Moo_Moo it is appriciated that you liked ours, even if just a little. I can tell you the lumping of skits was something that was talked about backstage and in the green room and is still being discussed on Cosplay.com. The overall agreement seems to be that noone liked it since we were afraid of the overkill effect it would have. Hopefully one of those things that can be looked into for next year or such.

Guys, please understand that we don't sit here and go "hey, let's lump together the bleach skits." A lot of it happens by virtue of coincidence, especially since a lot of you ask for preference in your performing order as well.

Please stop thinking that we do things just to be malicious. We put as much work into our event as you do your skits, and it's counterproductive to throw all that work down the drain for the sake of "having fun" at other people's expense.

Also, remember that hindsight is 20/20.

It's easy to go look at the rundown of skits after it's all said and done and say "hey, we grouped this series together." It is much more difficult, however, to try to avoid this thing as you're checking in people and stacking the rundown in a totally random manner. Eventually we have no choice but to place groups of identical skit sources together.

My database shows me every costume source that it being used by my list of entries as I'm picking their entry number. So if there was a serious case of lump, I'd be pretty aware of it. But in many cases, I have no choice but to do so.

The extent to "looking into things" that I can do for next year is pray that people will try to be diverse as possible. Variety is the spice of life, and the people that come to watch the Masquerade will appreciate it as well.

I'm not a fan of limiting skits by content either. The diversity of skits and content make it difficult to really create a definitive litmus to determine what constitutes a skit of a certain series.

No amount of mixing up the rundown will hide the fact that there we 20 Bleach skits (ok, I realize exaggerate that number)... I'll more than likely just get the complaint that there we too many Bleach skits instead, as opposed to too many and lumped together.

People like knowing where they're performing. So I can't change their performance order once I commit to their entry number. As much I'd like to mix up the rundown after check-in is over, I simply can't do it.

I do have to ask, would people be willing to totally lose their control over choosing where they perform in the running order to prevent lumping similiar skits together? It's really the only way I can have a good chance of preventing this from happening.

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Sigh, the arena staff got on my nerves as well truthfully. I understand that they're used to handling concerts more than anything else, and well, you have to be a bit dictator-like when you're handling that crowd.

But I will agree wholeheartedly that they got a little overexuberant at times. I saw a couple instances of it myself, and all I could do is more or less shake my head.

We know what we have to communicate to them now, so hopefully a lot of the grief can be prevented in the future.

With that said, however, if you have a specific instance of when arena staff we're not-so-nice, I'd appreciate it if you would pass it along to me so I know what to look out for. And with the number of cases I've heard of so far, we should probably start a new topic for it actually.

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Kenshin

We're all very happy for you! She's a very lucky lady too^^

Babbit

Never thought you guys would purposely lump stuff like that, hope you didn't think that's what we meant. LOL I don't think anyone would say "Hey I've got a wonderful idea, let's make all the Bleach Skits go into an hour block!" on purpose.

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