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Dear Fanime,


With utmost respect, please change your registration system for next year.

As an attendee to this con and several others since 2005, I've been in a lot of ridiculous lines. Fanime has taken the cake for ridiculousness the past two years. Conventions such as GDC or E3 have many more attendees but still somehow manage to make their registration fast and efficient. I have never had to wait in line at GDC or E3 for my pre-reg badge.

If you'll allow, some suggestions for improvement:

1) Automated check-in. GDC, for example, sets up about 30-50 laptops with a registration protocol that allows users to verify information. Once you check in, you walk to a booth and receive your badge from a person who verifies your ID with the just printed badge. It's fast and simple. You can rent laptops for short periods of time to avoid a humongous cost investment.

2) MAIL OUT BADGES. Please, please, PLEASE quit shooting this down! So many of us are willing to provide extra revenue to Fanime for this option. At 10-15$ a pop you'll make up for more than your time investment and mail costs to do this.

3) If registration of this nature continues, increase the incentives for pre-registering. Right now there are none, except a very small discount that is completely negated by the time waiting in line. I should not have to wait in line 3-4 hours to pick up my per-registered badge.

4) More registration personnel. I could not believe how few volunteers were manning the booths considering the number of attendees in line.


In short... Fanime, at this point you are no longer a small convention. According to many businesses in the area, this is SJCC's biggest convention of the year. You've got to put on your big boy pants and start considering new ways to manage your growing number of attendees. Assuming you didn't scare off a lot of long-time congoers, next year will only be larger. You have to anticipate this!

Fanime isn't wholly fan sponsored (I have a friend from one of the businesses who sponsors Fanime) and it shouldn't be treated as such any longer. No more excuses Fanime - step up to the plate!

Pros:
- Artist Alley let people enter and exit from both doors. When wearing a costume that is extremely limited in mobility, this saved me several precious minutes of walking.
- Lots of costumes this year - more so than I've seen in previous years.
- AA Staff was amazing. Thanks for all your hard work. :)

Cons:
- Pre-reg wait line was...insane on Friday. Can we try mailing badges next year?
- Dealer's hall exit and entrance - only one way while Artist Alley - just 10 feet away - had both open. Also, the Rover who was guarding the exit on Monday was rude. If you have something be an exit, exceptions should not be made - for staff, or anyone. I saw 6-7 people walk through while this Rover was busy texting on her phone, and when I tried to walk through and pointed out the huge group that went in before me when stopped, her answer was "they were staff". Yea, bet you could tell that while staring at your phone, couldn't you. Be fair, Fanime. It's conflicting to people when you let some people go through and not others.
- Elevators in the Marriott. Every year, someone thinks its funny to throw a dance party in an elevator, and then they break the elevator. We had two shut down from Sunday night through Monday. It was ridiculous. Props to the Rover who let us know what was going on - it didn't solve the problem but at least we didn't sit there frustrated.
- Oblivious attendees. Seriously folks, how do you not know you are standing and talking in the middle of the walkway? Is it really so hard to move a foot over to the left? I had numerous "run-ins" with people who just stopped in the middle of a walkway to talk to people or take a picture. It literally takes one second to move slightly aside.
- After hours behavior. I get it - you're at Fanime, you're having fun, and many of you are clearly drunk. I don't really want to be exposed to some of the indecency and over-friendly things that I ran into a couple of nights. No, I do not want to -insert sexual innuendo here-. I'm okay with people having a good time, but it'd be nice - at least on the elevators - for staff to keep regular checks for people having fun at other attendees' expense. Particularly with the breaking of elevators thing. :(

Also - if you're below the 10th floor, realize that there are stairs. Those stuck on the 20th+ floor sort of hate you when you take the elevator up to or from the 5th floor.

I heard a rumor that due to the pull-down of the sign in the garage, as well as some shady tactics from the garage office, a lot of us ended up not getting the Fanime parking discount. I know I didn't.

I did hear that someone on the forums somewhere said that you can contact the office for a refund for parking paid over the price? I paid 80$ for 3 days, 8 hours, so I'm up for seeing if I can get any of that back.

If anyone knows how to contact the garage office too, that'd be awesome. I can't find their contact information anywhere. :(


Thanks for any help!

Yay. Done. :B

Just wondering, how many people do small-ish dances and the like during their performances?

A couple of people do. The problem is the stage is not the most sturdy thing on the planet - not that it's going to break, but it will jostle near surroundings and is pretty loud. It's probably not recommended to be super rambunctious on it. Dance moves should be fine though, long as it isn't break dancing or similar stunts.

Usually there are some rules on adjustment of tracks - ie, editing, etc.

What are the rules this year?

Personally, I'm fairly interested in wondering if I can put a bar of tapping in front of my song since it's one of those where you need to sing from the first second - and if there are volume issues I'd be concerned about missing it. A lead in would help a lot.

Is it a new rule that non-Asian oriented video game costumes aren't allowed? I was considering trying my luck this year, but I realized that Dragon Age probably won't qualify (I'm doing Flemeth, with fully studded armor and everything :(). That's kind of a bummer.

Not to suggest you should spam them, but have you send a follow-up e-mail? I had one e-mail that went without a response for 4-5 days, so I sent another and got that one responded to fairly quickly.

Secondly, I do feel that the artist alley has slowly built up a sense of greed and lack of etiquette in some artists and I have a proposal.  With many artists simply using fanart to cater to fans despite the obvious legalities to garner the most monies, I propose a profit cutoff scheme.  If an artist is profiting more than double the cost of the table (based on current fanime/AX prices or perhaps just the dealer table fees) then they graduate from artist alley and may only purchase dealer hall tables from that point on.  The alley is meant to help promote new artists and ideas, not earn a living (especially when it is primarily done through copyright infringement).  If an artist is just interested in making money then let them compete on a level field with all the other dealers. 

I agree with a lot of your post - but definitely NOT this portion, for a few reasons:

1) There ARE artists who go to artist alleys and do commissions/sell prints as a living - and I don't see why this shouldn't be okay. In fact, I think this should be encouraged. It's difficult to make it as an artist - any kind of artist - and that there are places like conventions, flea markets, etc, that allow artists to rent a space for cheap is important to the art community as a whole. There's a sense of equality in the AA that prevents the idea of competing for profits. For one, you have the same space, and your art could be to one person's taste but not to another. Art is so subjective, how do you determine something like unfair profiteering because someone is either "better" at it or caters to a specific audience? That's not unfair, and you can't prove someone is doing it purely for profit.

2) If you judge the amount of profit you make only by the cost of renting the table - you're missing out completely on the costs of supplies and labor. For example, I make corsets. I may sell one corset from between 45$-400$. However, it takes 20-40 hours of labor to make a corset, and the base cost of supplies is around 65$. By your standards, if I sold just one corset, I'd have to move to the dealers room.

3) There is a strong difference in selling art of your own creation and selling merchandise. The business acumen is completely different, as is the amount of labor involved in the creation of the product. On one end, you create the product from conception to physical form. On the other, you play economics and purchase the items created by others. Not that you can't self produce, but the idea is that in the dealer's room, this is a place where the intention is sales of mass quantities of merchandise, much of which is not necessarily acquired or created by yourself.


I completely disagree with the idea that someone who is successful needs to leave the AA because they are doing better than others - that feels like a punishment rather than a graduation (hey you're doing well here, but that's not fair to others because they're not doing as well as you, so lets throw you in a venue where you can't compete without several hundred dollars of investment in space and product and if you fail, well, that's just too bad). I just feel that if you're not doing so well, maybe it's not because there's heavy competition, or because of fan art - it's because that artist is just not that good, or selected bad pieces, or the quality of their prints/buttons/bookmarks/keychains is crap. Hard truth for someone who doesn't do well, but I think we should consider personal failures before blaming others for an artist's lack of success.

I actually got a reply from Fanime about the waitlist - apparently it was bugging out so they removed it. I can say they did get past the 30s in the waitlist - but if you were in the 50's or higher, I think your chances of getting in are kind of low.

On topic - I had my plushie rejected too. He was a Moogle that was hollow so you could use him as a bag. It's the only thing of mine that was turned down though, and I can understand the issue with crafts and especially plushies. I think they just look too similar to official merchandise, even if your particular article is not the exact same or a character that is actively made.

That's useful info, but I'm more interested in actual restrictions on height. It's not just about displaying what you want to sell, but signage.

Is there an official area of the rules that specifies it? Or maybe a mod can comment with specific rules?

Also curious - we have plans for a vertical display as well.

I've done the Karaoke contest at Fanime every year since 2006 or so (with the exception of last year, I missed check in 'cause I was napping :B) and every year, sign-ups usually don't open until late April or early May. They usually post preliminary rules around the same time.

Sign-ups go really fast though - and if Artist Alley & Hotel Reg is any indication, expect it to fill up within minutes.

Not to mention the hotels block out those dates for Fanime, so it's not possible in most circumstances to register outside of the Fanime site.

Not true. I got my Seller's Permit to start late May until August, and I did it in January. I'm pretty sure you can get it whenever. Though I don't think you need the actual permit until the convention - I don't think you're required to have it for registration or sign up of your table.

We're wait-listed - but unless about 10% of artists drop their tables or don't get approved, or they add additional tables, we're far enough down the list to have little chance of getting our own table. I'm still hoping for that, but at this point, it just seems prudent to seek out other options.

Oh, I also wanted to add that my partner and I are both industry professionals - my partner works in vfx for film, and is also currently working on an unannounced AAA game title, and I'm a retired professional costumer currently working in video game production (in other words, I make things awesome and profitable). We've got fun stories to tell and a really diverse, awesome skill set that we want to make work for you. <3

We no longer need a table!

What are the chances of additional tables or space being created to allow admittance of more artists?

I'm seriously bummed about being on the waitlist. Does anyone know the chances of getting on when you're further down the line? I made my account within 5 minutes but took the time to add my permit, partner's, and our two helpers info and that took more time that I had thought. :(