SacAnime 2011, a Late-Summer anime convention continues its tradition of a strong lineup of guests of honor and musical guests!
Day 1 event highlights include:
Q&A With The SLANTS, a panel featuring the Slants where they performed acoustic renditions of their songs.
Voice Actor Q&A Pt. 1, a panel featuring Tara Platt & Johnny Yong Bosch.
Voice Actor Q&A Pt. 2, a panel featuring Yuri Lowenthal & Liam O' Brien.
The J-Fashion Show, a walk-on fashion show featuring various types of J-Fashion.
The SacAnime Concert Series, an indoor concert featuring Eyeshine, Akai Sky and The Slants.
The Tara and Johnny panel starts with a rare chance to see Yuri Lowenthal playing the role of Johnny Yong Bosch! Check out our video of this at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usjbSWEPP_Q
SacAnime is particularly good at constructing their panels with interesting combinations of guests and panel themes. This allows guests to play off each other to spark conversations and stories.
When we tried checking out the game rooms during the evening of Day 1, the main room was closed with no information as to why or when they were reopening. Strange...
Day 1 concluded with a swap meet and a rave.
Day 2 event highlights include:
Dubbing with Liam & Sam, where Liam O' Brien and Sam Riegel showed the voice acting audition process through mock voice acting sessions with attendees.
Eyeshine Q&A, a panel featuring Eyeshine. This event also included a few acoustic performances.
Journey of a Voice Actor, a panel featuring James C. Burns where he showed some behind-the-scenes footage.
Q&A with Tara & Yuri, a panel featuring Tara Platt and Yuri Lowenthal.
Kurenai Concert, an outdoor concert featuring Sacramento-based anime cover band, Kurenai.
Who's Line Is It Anime?, an improv comedy game show featuring the guests of honor.
The Cosplay Masquerade Costume Contest
Day 2 concluded with the Anime Music Video contest, an outdoor concert series, and another rave.
While the convention schedule only showed a concert series on Day 1 and an Eyeshine concert on Day 2, they ended up becoming two complete concert series. An indoor concert series on Day 1 and an outdoor concert series on Day 2, both featuring Eyeshine, Akai Sky and The Slants!
After a pretty solid first 2 days of events, Day 3 was considerably lighter with only one maid cafe session (Summer 2010's final day held 3-4 sessions) and one guest of honor event, the Voice Actor Q&A Finale. While the Voice Actor Q&A Finale was interesting because it had so many voice actor guests, it lacked focus because was too short for the number of questions/answers that had to go between guests and attendees.
Absent from SacAnime Summer 2011, was the anime viewing rooms. This was disappointing because I had been impressed with their viewing rooms in the past because they help introduce me to great series such as High School of the Dead.
Speaking of High School of the Dead, here's a SacAnime Summer 2011 video of Kurenai performing a cover of the High School of the Dead theme song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF1-RuHKxME
In lieu of the viewing rooms appeared to be the Matsuri Festival, an interesting collection of activities such as sumo suit sumo wrestling and a ninja forest maze. Unfortunately, the Matsuri Festival was only open 11:00AM-5:00PM on Days 1 and 2.
While SacAnime Summer 2011 was light on programming for its last day, the two concert series on Day 1 and 2 was very cool. I rate SacAnime Summer 2011 as 7/10.
-Michael Tang
mtangATconventionlife.com (fix the @)
Supplemental updates are planned for this article.
Thanks to Helen Lam for additional photos!
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