Topics

Hello!  I'm just curious how many people out there might want program guides from the last three years and don't already have them.  The poll is set to allow you to select up to three choices.

Hi!  It sounds like several people don't read the program guides at the convention, so I was curious about how people expect to get information about the convention.  Do people just expect everything useful to be in the schedules?  Or are people getting information via other means?  How many people normally check for new information when they get to the convention, or is everything expected to be posted to the web?

Hi!

I just wanted to mention that we are out of schedules at the convention.  We had ordered 10,000, but there have already been 10,000 attendees, and it's only Saturday!  We're printing more, but I just wanted to send out a note for people to please not lose or trash their schedules.  Also, if people are still at home and want to print schedules for themselves (or if people have PDF viewers on handheld systems and want to put the schedules there), the version we've been printing is here:

http://www.fanime.com/file_download/48/FanimeCon_2008_Schedule.pdf

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Hi!

I'm head of Publications, and I wanted to start a thread for feedback and suggestions for the program guide and newsletters.

For the program guide, other than the exact dates and locations of events (which are in the schedule), did you find what you need?  Was there anything you wished we added?  Would you have preferred more pictures?  More text?  More humor?  More information?  More pages in general?  Or was it too long?  Would you have preferred fewer pages?  Did you enjoy the content, or was it too dry?

How was the map?  Was it legible?  Understandable?  Cryptic?  Did it have enough information?

For the newsletters, did you see pre-con newsletters?  If so, where did you see them?  Are you finding the at-con newsletters?  We've been distributing to the four Info Desks, the Publications table in Artist Alley, and the FanimeCon booth in the Dealers Room.  What do you think of the newsletters so far?  Were the articles informative, or were they too dry?  Is there something else we should be writing?

Any comments would be appreciated.  Thanks!

Hello!  I'm looking for feedback about the FanimeCon 2007 at-con newsletters.  Did people just not see them at all (again)?  Or did people see them and just not want to pick them up?

I'm also looking for newsletter staff, including writers, reporters, and Chief Editors.  Please see http://forums.fanime.com/viewtopic.php?t=7803 for more information.

Hello!

This year, I'm head of Code Name: Division 5, and I'm looking for staff.  Division 5 is responsible for doing the program guide, newsletters, flyers, signs, printing, and the web site.  (I'd like to call the group "Publications", but the name hasn't been fully approved yet.)  I need staff who can do some or all of the following:

• Proofreading.  With the Internet being full of mistakes, many people are used to reading what was meant rather than what's on the screen, but it would still be nice to make sure that text is correct before things get printed or put on a web site.  Therefore, I need people who can point out and correct errors.  Proofreading will mostly occur before the convention via e-mail.
  
  
• Reporting.  There are many things going on, and not everybody can be everywhere at once.  So, it's nice to have a lot of people who can give an accurate report about what happened at a staff meeting or panel.  Reporting requires attending the event and then submitting notes via e-mail, hopefully within the same day.  With plenty of cons, Asian culture festivals, staff meetings, and panels, there are lots of opportunities for reporting before and during the convention.  Depending on the reporting assignment, reporters may be required to attend staff meetings.
  
  
• Writing.  I was trying to hire people who can both report and write before, but it seems that it's rare to have both skills.  It's one thing to give an accurate account of what happened, but it's quite another to be able to phrase it in a way that's meaningful and interesting.  Writers need to be able to read through a potentially boring or chaotic report, figure out what's interesting and important about the report, and make a readable article out of it.  Depending on the writing assignment, writers may be required to attend staff meetings.
  
  
• Editing.  I need one or more Chief Editors for Newsletters.  There are supposed to be 16 issues of the FanimeCon newsletter per year, and I just haven't been able to get it done.  The Chief Editors need to decide what articles need to be present in each newsletter, assign reporters and writers to get those articles, get a proofreader to look over the articles, compile all the information into a PDF, and direct the Print and/or Web groups about how the newsletters need to be distributed.  Chief Editors are not required to attend staff meetings.  There are 10 pre-con online issues and 6 at-con print issues, so there is a lot of room to choose which issues you want to work on.
  
  
• Printing.  If someone has experience dealing with print shops, we can arrange pre-con hours, but otherwise, the print positions are at-con right now.  Basically, you take a shift during the convention and sit in a room with a printer.  Other departments will ask for things to be printed, and you print them and make sure they get delivered or picked up.  You have to have a laptop capable of printing PDF and Word documents.  You will need to use the laptop at the convention, and you will probably have to install print drivers onto it.
  
  
• Print design.  The print designer would take art and text specified by the department and arrange them into an attractive flyer or other print medium.  Print designing doesn't require attendance at meetings, and all work would be via e-mail.
  
  
• Web work.  Right now, there's still time to turn in a portfolio to [email protected] Cc: [email protected] if people want to apply to help with the web design for 2008.  (For more details, see http://forums.fanime.com/viewtopic.php?t=7371.)  However, the deadline to apply for web designer is today.  Sorry about that.  Even if you don't make the design deadline, there may be potential openings for people to help out with updating and maintaining the web site front end.
  

I have enough openings that most positions can be made to conform to the mix of tasks people would like to perform.  For example, you can choose to be Chief Editor for some issues of the newsletter and a proofreader on others.  Staff are required to put in a minimum of 24 hours per year to earn their staff badge (although most put in far more hours than that), but I'm willing to negotiate whatever mix of pre-con and at-con hours people want to work (in addition to the mix of tasks they want to perform).

To apply, please send e-mail to [email protected].  Please indicate which tasks you're interested in, what experience you might have doing those tasks, and what hours you would like to work.

Thank you!

Hi!

I don't have any authorization from upper management to post this (I don't have authorization from upper management to post anything, actually), and I don't expect this poll will have any influence on what they do about the program guides, but I'm very curious about how people felt about getting a program guide for a convention after it's over.  As of this moment, we do NOT have a full set of program guides from the print shop.  If the print shop can be convinced to print out the program guides, how many of you still want them?

From my point of view, it's the most beautiful program guide in the history of FanimeCon (but I'm biased; I helped on it  ^_^; ), and everybody should keep and cherish a copy of it forever and ever.

However, the more realistic side of me wonders if everybody else would agree.  I wonder how many people throw theirs away after the con because the information is out of date.  I wonder how many rip apart and digitize theirs instead (which isn't necessary this year because the PDF is online).

Remember: this poll is just for fun and out of idle curiosity.  Furthermore, I'd be interested to hear more opinions, suggestions, anecdotes, etc. about the program guide in general.  Vent; it'd be good to get it off your chest.  Or tell printing jokes; we can use the humor.

I made the poll last 7 days.

Very fast poll.  You have one day to vote.  The schedule is one double-sided 8.5" x 14" sheet per day.  I was thinking we should keep every day separate so people can pick schedules up for just that day, and if you lose the schedule, you wouldn't have to pick up an entire set of 4 sheets.  Besides, since it's two-sided and such a large sheet of paper, I personally think it's a bit of a pain to handle when it's stapled.  However, my boss says fans will want the schedules pre-stapled.  So, I'm asking the fans on the board: is she right?  Do you want your schedules pre-stapled?

Before you vote, though, please see the schedule first.  It's at...

http://www.fanime.com/schedule/schedule.pdf

Even though I would generally want schedules stapled myself, I just don't think that this particular schedule is in a format that will work well when stapled together.

I was browsing through a magazine that randomly showed up at home, and I came across mentions of FanimeCon!  I thought it was pretty cool to start hearing about the con in random magazines, so I figured I'd scan in the pieces and post the information in case other people wanted to see.  :)

FanimeCon 2007-05 San Jose Magazine Volume 10 Issue 5 Page 12.jpg
FanimeCon 2007-05 San Jose Magazine Volume 10 Issue 5 Page 66.jpg

Hi!  I was the newsletter editor for FanimeCon 2006, and it was a hectic year.  It's my first year on staff, and it was very different from what I expected.  I'm sorry about messing up the banner, making the font sizes and spacing turn out strange (it didn't look so bad on the monitor), not getting in nearly as much content as I wanted, and all the other mistakes I made that I don't know about yet.  I know I can do better, so I've signed up to do this again in 2007.

Things I know I messed up:

• Banner image.  I tried to resize it myself, and it just didn't print right.  (It looked fine on the screen.)  I'll have a graphics artist resize it properly for me next year.
  
• Format.  The newsletter just didn't look the way I expected after I printed it.  I plan to spend more time becoming familiar with the software and template before next year, and I plan to bring my own printer so I can preview any tweaks to the format without having to constantly visit ConOps.
  
• Contest winners.  As I was compiling Monday's newsletter, it occured to me that I should've gone around and tracked down all of the departments that held contests and get official lists of the winners for the newsletter, but I couldn't make it happen in time (partly because I had no idea how to reach them at the con on such short notice).  For next year, I plan to find and e-mail contest coordinators ahead of time and tell them to expect a newsletter reporter to approach them at their events and pick up an official list of winners.
  
• Missed events.  I'm very, very sorry about not covering the premiere year of the fashion show.  I wanted to cover it, but things were such a mess that the Saturday morning newsletter was already many hours late (so I had to rename it to the Saturday afternoon newsletter), and it was crunch time for the Saturday evening newsletter (which I eventually decided to cancel and get a head start on Sunday instead).
  

Also, for next year, I have a few questions I wanted to ask everybody:

• Is there something we can do that would encourage people to pick up the newsletter?  We only printed 500 copies per issue, most of them didn't get picked up, and there were over ten thousand attendees.  Our readership seems to be less than 1% of the potential number of people.  Is this because the newsletter needs better content?  Or did people simply not know about them?  Or were people maybe too busy having fun to read the newsletter no matter what the content said?
  
  
• Should we aim for fewer issues?  For 2006, we had six issues: pink for Friday evening, yellow for Saturday afternoon, green for Sunday morning, blue for Sunday evening, goldenrod for Monday, and red for the special MusicFest edition.  Is that too many issues?  Is it too much for people to stop by the Info Desk twice a day if they want to pick up newsletters?  Would people prefer one two-page newsletter per day instead two one-page newsletters per day?
  
  
• What information would you want covered in the newsletter?  Looking at the newsletters from previous years, it looks like they covered a lot of policies, rules, and upcoming events.  I figured that a newsletter should report about what happened at the con, so I sent writers into the field to cover events.  Others brought up ideas about adding commentary about "fan life", such as "What do fans eat?", "How do they cope with sleep deprivation?", and "What do cosplayers really do?"  This year, I mostly kept the announcements to the side bar and put panel reports in the main section of the page.  Where I could, I modified articles earlier in the weekend to also tell people about the speakers' later panels.   Did that work for people?  I ended up cutting all the "fan life" articles.  Would people preferred to read that instead?  Are there better suggestions?  Do you want humor pieces?  Controversial pieces?
  
  
• Are there any other suggestions or comments?  Anything else I should try to fix?  Any questions I should've asked but didn't?  The current numbers seem to suggest that either very few people want these newsletters or very few people know about them.  Whichever the case, I'd like to try to fix it.  For those who didn't know about the newsletters, I posted the PDFs from 2006 to http://tenba.multiply.com/.  I put them in the video section, so you may need to explicitly specify a PDF reader to view them.

Any comments, suggestions, or feedback about the newsletter would be much appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

Hi!  Does anyone have a list of what new anime came out and is coming out in Japan this month?  I used to get the information from anime-daisuki.net but the web site doesn't seem to be working right now.

And the first Fanime was at CSU Hayward in June for all you history buffs out there. :D

Neat!  Just for fun, here are some other ones:

1999 Mar 19-21 Santa Clara Convention Center / Wyndam Hotel, 2000 attendees
2000 Feb 24-27 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, 2300
2001 Mar 30-32 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, 3750
2002 Apr 26-28 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, ?
2003 Jun 20-22 Westin, Santa Clara, CA, ?
2004 May 28-31 San Jose Convention Center / Mariott, San Jose, CA, 5700 <-- Footnote 1.
2005 May 27-30 San Jose Convention Center / Mariott and Hilton, San Jose, CA

I was going to ask about the rest, but I had pulled out my program booklets to look up the dates and found a great article about Fanime History article in the 2002 program book:

1994 ? CSU Hayward, "almost 100"
1995 ? CSU Hayward, 350
1996 Feb, Foothill College, Los Altos, CA, 775
1997 ? Foothill College, Los Altos, CA, 1200
1998 ? Foothill College, Los Altos / Sheraton, Sunnyvale, CA, 1700

If people want to tell me how to fill in the question marks, that'd be fun.

Also, if anyone wants to tell stories of the early days or about their first cons or anything, I'd love to hear them.  Fanime is growing very quickly, and things have been changing to accomodate the growth.  Things that happened "back in the day" might not be able to happen in the future.  It'd be nice to keep alive the memories of past Fanime and Fanime lore.  Things like...  Armitage's slip... Chocolate Misu... Dieter and his funny impromptu monologues... things that happened on the dance floor or the cosplay... directors singing during live panels... and what is it with "horse" and "chair" anyways?

My story is from this year since I have a very bad memory.  One of the guests of honor was Hiroaki Inoue.  He gave a great talk about Japanese Sci-Fi books being the basis for a lot of anime.  At the end of the panel, he announced that he had a gift for us, and he pulled out this reel of film.  He went on to explain that the film contained Ah, Megamisama! when a pair of scissors appears in his hand.  As the audience started to line up, Inoue-san really started unrolling the film, cutting off strips of it, and handing the strips to the people in line.  I couldn't tell if I felt more honored to get a strip of that film or more shocked that the film reel was being destroyed like that.

EDIT Footnote 1:  From http://fanime.altimus-labs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2184&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=:

At the lowest end of the spectrum, about 5700 total paid fans attended. This number excludes children, special badges, and people who didn't claim their badge.

At the highest end of the spectrum, about 7400 attendees visited FanimeCon. This number includes guests, staff, and so on.