New York City photographer Tina Chou survived Day 2 of her first anime convention — AnimeNEXT! By now she’s got her Anime Con going on… From Tina: Hello again! Great to see everyone’s comments, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside! I realized I tend to ramble between the hours of 12 and 4AM so I’ll launch right into Day 2 now.

We got to the convention center later than intended at around 11AM and could not find a space to park. There were so many people (and therefore parked cars) that we almost gave up. But right as all hope was almost lost, we saw a spot and quickly reversed into it. Other people were not as lucky — remember this for voice actor Tom Wayland below…

Definitely more people today than yesterday but I wasn’t oogling as much. I didn’t really notice the giant weapons, the loud talking, the cosplaying, the chainsaws, the gunblades, the wigs, the cat ears, the paddles, etc. as much anymore. I spent an hour in the Videogames section waiting for the DDR tournament to begin which drew about 20 participants. After that, I went to the “Breaking into Voice Acting” panel with Tom Wayland and Toshifuma Yoshida. I acted all reporter-like and brought some paper and pen this time.

The panel began promptly at 1PM with Toshifumi Yoshida, an anime producer (InuYasha, Ranma ½, many others), talking about his new show Kurokami which is also viewable on Bandai’s YouTube channel. At 1:06PM he received a call from Tom Wayland (director and voice actor) who had apparently been driving around the various parking lots for the last 15 minutes unable to find a spot.

In the meantime, Toshi talked about what kinds of things aspiring voice actors should do. As a producer, he looks for 2 kinds of actors: people who have a great voice that is consistent (Richard Cox) and actors with range able to make a lot of voices (Paul Dobson). Range is very appealing and also more financially efficient. Then he talked about the money involved and how people are not buying as many anime DVDs as before. If 85% of a DVD budget is for voice actors, low DVD sales have a big effect on the industry especially since subtitling is an alternative. In a serious and somewhat morose tone he told us that if everyone at every convention bought just one DVD, they would be able to save the anime industry.

Then right on cue, Tom Wayland ran in with the air of general happiness that surrounds him and the panel switched gears. I was there for about 45 minutes but I’ll put the main points here in case anyone is interested.
– Voice actors should send voice demos (not on cassette tapes but CDs) that make them sound unique or different, preferably professionally looking and sounding ones, even if they are homemade.
– Pay attention to details too, such as email address Toshi suggests registering your name as a web domain.
– Voice actors are not salaried and essentially freelancers. It’s good pay for the time but the work isn’t consistent and hard to find.
– Tom also says that it’s important to be where the work is because companies will not fly actors to their studios. He mentions are any major metropolitan area is a good place to be such as New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Vancouver.
– Voices by themselves are usually not enough, you need to be able to act and having training helps a lot.
– Most money for voice actors is in commercials, radio, and TV. Like the voice that says, “You’re listening to x Radio Station!”
– When it comes to making deadlines, people want a VA who can get everything down quickly in the studio. This is why a lot of the same names appear in anime from the same companies since they can probably get more lines in an hour than other actors.

If you’re interested in making a demo, they recommended having it no more than 1-2 minutes with tracks that flow. Maybe one with your regular voice, a character voice, and then a commercial (you can use any). Lastly, at auditions, you need to be able to perform the voices on your demo on demand since that is what they will expect. Then he started taking questions and I left for the FAKE? Q&A session. (btw, that’s FAKE? mastermind Ken Lloyd smiling at the vendor booth in the “6th Ave” jacket — I asked him to try smiling.)

After that I hit up the C.R.A.Z.Y.O.T.A.K.U. event where people competed in different events. The room was packed and full of chaos. The winners of each event gained entry to the Pocky Olympics to win prizes. Some of the events being played were WarioWare Lifeline on the Wii, trivia questions, name the anime song, and anime improv. It was very entertaining with people yelling all over the place, especially when they asked for the audience to shout out nouns and locations for the improv challenge. I was looking forward to the improv conversation but when half the people chose to be Pokemon, it kind of fell flat. Link and Batman won that event.

Pocky Olympics involves holding a Pocky stick in each hand parallel to each other while balancing a third across them. The goal is to knock the other person’s third Pocky stick off first. This was a tournament.

The next event was the Cosplay Masquerade at 7PM. I had 2 hours to kill so I visited CosPrints again and had some great conversation with the photographers that were there. But an hour later they were really busy and I got bored so I enlisted the help of a ninja.

I got to the Masquerade 15 minutes early and it was already packed. More chaos was happening because the projectors had live video so whenever the camera focused on someone, they and everyone around them would go crazy. I’ve been to the NCAA men’s lacrosse finals on national television and the fans on camera were not halfway as crazy as the people here. You’d think they were on an intergalactic broadcast or something. At some point three people started making out on camera and the place got even louder. Anyway, the event was emceed by “Kiko” who had a broken English accent that faded in and out. I wasn’t sure whether it was mildly offensive or not but I thought she was funny. She made a hen-tie joke. (She had a Wheel of Fun with a paper chicken on it that she spun every few acts. She told us it was time for “hentai” but the she put a necktie on the chicken and said “hen-tie.” Hah.)

I thought the Masquerade would sort of be like a fashion show displaying amazing costumes but it was really a bunch of skits that were also being judged. I was not impressed with most of them even though I’m sure a lot of time went into them. I thought only a handful were actually entertaining. There were Sailor Scouts dancing to Lady GaGa, dancing fighting Capcom characters, a duel with Pokemon between a trainer and a Yu-Gi-Oh duelist, a funky xxxHolic puppet show, and some kind of Death Note musical crossed with Wicked. The one that really stood out was a reenactment of Revolutionary Girl Utena with really good costumes and acting topped off with a great choreographed sword fight scene. This skit won the overall award and coincidentally had the cosplayers I photographed yesterday with the white dresses and blue and orange flames (they also won an award for those costumes).

After the Masquerade, they played the winning AMVs (anime music videos) on the screens. The editing on all of them was excellent and many times the song lyrics would match the anime actions which must have taken an extremely long time to put together. The Action genre winner was about Code Geass set to “You Know My Name” which evoked the James Bond movie but I did notice a theme with the first three videos (Action, Sentimental, Upbeat). The first one had a girl mowing down people with a machine gun, the second one had a girl mowing down tables and chairs, and the third one had a girl who mowed into a window. I was entertained and so was much of the audience that chose to stay.

Afterwards, awards for the Masquerade and costumes were given out. The overall winning costume had glowing red eyes that probably obscured the wearer’s vision. With that over at 9PM, I thought I would sneak into the “Bad Anime Bad” panel which surprisingly was almost full. I came in halfway through for “Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned” showing. I thought it would be numerous anime scenes but it stuck to Dracula. The anime of gloriously awfully bad and the panelist was funny but not as hilarious as he thought he was. I left at around 11PM and wandered to the Table Top Games room. On my way there I passed several of the screening rooms that had a lot of people in there and another Werewolf game in session. At this time the Dance was going on but I didn’t go. It had been drizzling on and off all day but by night it started to really rain. So I left the Dance and the Hentai panel behind, and went back to the hotel. — Tina.