auntiemeesh | Dragon*con report

I'm home! The cats survived, despite a broken water main, and I was happy to see them.

I love my camera. I will never be a photographer, and I haven't really figured out how to use it to best effect, so a lot of my pictures are less than crisp and clear, but I got pictures of some great costumes.

So, on to the Dragon*con mega report.

Thursday was fourteen hours in the car. We pulled in to the Marriott just at midnight. Met up with

rock_biologist and pretty much crashed.

Friday, the fun started. We got up earlyish to stand in line to pick up our badges. Thursday evening or Friday morning is the time to do this. Later in the weekend the line for registration went out the building and down the block. There must be a better way to do it.

We spent most of the day in the room, finishing up the cat/nun costumes. Those things were a bitch and a half to get done, but we finally finished them up in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Friday afternoon we took a break to walk around, check out some costumes, and ran into

suenix. We hit the Stargate Atlantis fan panel, which was pretty entertaining - in the sense that the panel was run by four fangirls that spent the entire time squeeing over Rodney McKay. They were attempting to give a rundown of Season three but half of them hadn't even seen all the episodes, so it was a little patchy. I don't actually remember if I took any pictures on Friday. Sadly, I dumped all the pics off my memory card saturday morning, so I lost everything I took before noon or so.

Saturday started off with a bang. The parade starts at ten, so we had to get up and get our costumes and makeup on, and find our way to the meeting place before then.

eve11 and I walked with the Doctor Who contingent, of whom there were about thrity. The parade is so much fun, being part of this huge group of people who all share the love of costuming, for whatever reason they do it. The parade winds through several blocks of downtown Atlanta, ending up back at the marriott, where the DW group gathered for group photos.

There were lots of Doctors - all ten were represented at least once.

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We made quite a group all gathered together.

The cat/nuns with Lady Cassandra, the last human. I'm the one on the right.

A close up of the cat faces - the prosthetic is, unfortunately, pulling away from my eye.

For me, the best part of Dragon*Con is doing the costuming, wandering around as someone else, seeing all the other great (and some not so great) costumes. There are anime characters, characters straight out of books, movies, tv shows, comic books. There are girls who dress in hoop skirts, corsets, fairy costumes, sometimes not much more than body paint and pasties. During the day there are small kids running around dressed as Jedi Knights and astronauts, but at night some of the costumes get pretty risque. There are the aforesaid mostly naked women, people with collars and chains (it's usually men being led around by women) and a whole host of other stuff fun stuff. This is just a small sampling of the many and varied costumes at this year's Dragon*Con.

We saw these Venture Bros. Henchmen on Saturday...

...and the Monarch on Sunday.

There were a ton of Harry Potter costumes, mostly just people running around in house robes - lots of Gryffindor and some Slytherin. We saw a really great group dressed up as the Azkaban Quidditch team but didn't catch a picture of it. I did get a pic of this random Quidditch player (a Seeker, judging by the Golden Snitch in her hand) and Professor Quirrell.

I also ran across Snape, boldly displaying his Dark Mark.

Our roommie,

rock_biologist, in his fabulous D'Argo outfit.

Here's the Doctor and Rose, with their pet Dalek. It got a lot of comments, particularly re: the Dalek's limp appendages (it's been neutered).

There are certain fandoms that are always extremely well-represented. Star Wars is possibly the biggest, with the 501st Legion of Stormtroopers and about a horde of Leias, mostly in slave garb. But there are also always a few people who find ways to make the Star Wars costumes original. Two years ago there was a LEGO Darth Vader. This year my favorite Star Wars costume was this trio of people dressed as Chewbacca, Vader and a stormtrooper, all made out of cardboard boxes and duct tape.

I also really liked this Stormtrooper clean-up crew.

On Sunday, we had a last minute costuming extravaganza.

eve11 wanted to have a second run at Aku (we took him out on Friday but I didn't get any pics). Before we could do that, though, we decided to make a Samurai Jack to go along with it. So, Sunday morning (and mid-afternoon) was spent in the room creating Jack. We had no intention of spending any money on this costume and it took a little doing to figure out how to do Jack's robe (a bed sheet could have worked if we'd been able to cut it but foldig just wouldn't do) but one hotel bathrobe later and we were in business. We used 2mm craft foam and foam board (donated by

rock_biologist to make the face, sword and some shoes.

The sword, face, robe and shoes, finally finished.

Samurai Jack and Aku, in action. After getting Jack put together, we went out and wandered around for a little while (or at least planted ourselves somewhere for a while - Aku was up on stilts and neither of us could see very well).

I didn't go to any panels on Saturday or Sunday but I really wanted to catch at least one of the big Stargate panels, and there was one at ten yesterday morning. I'm glad I went. It was a lot of fun, even if I didn't learn anything terribly new or important about either show. The panel consisted of Vanessa Angel (I think she played a Tokra at some point), Christopher Judge, Michael Shanks, Lexa Doig, Alexis Cruz and Jason Momoa.

Christopher Judge came on stage carrying a half-empty bottle of beer.

Michael Shanks followed, also with beer. Lexa Doig made a point of displaying that she was drinking coffee when she came on, Alexis Cruz had both beer and coffee, and Jason Momoa had beer, too. Other than Lexa, they all seemed to be more 'still drunk' than 'hung over.'

Jason spent most of the panel leaned back in his chair, trying to sleep, but every now and again he was pulled into the conversation. He was also drinking lots of water, straight out of the big pitcher on the table. I failed to get a picture of that, but did catch him grinning at Christopher Judge.

At these sorts of things, most of the audience questions are stupid and/or obnoxious and this time was no exception. One question led to an interesting discussion of how crappy the Zat guns are, with Chris Judge demonstrating how they work, with hand motions.

The panel was mostly the Chris and Michael show, with the two of them taking it in turn to give each other grief, dodging more that's not my questions than they answered. The panel started off with a woman asking Michael about Mega Snake. He immediately cut her off, ordering her to stop right there. Her response: "Sweetie, if I had to sit through it, the least you can do is answer a question about it." He replied: "Sweetie, if you have nothing better to do with your time, that's your problem." There was much laughter and some more back and forth before the Mega Snake subject was dropped.

The most obnoxious question asked was by some woman who wanted to know, if the actors had to choose, would they rather be rich, bloated, conceited movie stars like Charleton Heston, or responsible, well-behaved tv stars like Richard Dean Anderson.

Michael Shanks: "Why do I feel like we're being led down a path, here?" Considering that Chris had already spent a good bit of time rhapsodizing about acid tripping and sex during the filming of the pilot, he simply asked which paid more.

The question that led to the most interesting answer was one man's comment about Dragon*con being about creative expression, and Michael Shanks agreed, but asked that this expression stop short of furries. Chris couldn't understand why, and there was much squirming as Michael tried to get Chris to drop it until later, mention that there were children in the audience. Chris totally didn't understand what that had to do with anything and finally Lexa whispered in his ear for a minute. His reaction was perfect. "What?! What!!!?! And I haven't done this?" Lexa: "Haven't you ever seen CSI?" It really was pretty hilarious.

After that, the con was pretty much over. We did go to one more panel, a costuming one, in which a group of professional costume/make-up effects guys talked about mistakes they've experienced in the trade. Some pretty interesting/frightening stories of wardrobe and prop malfunction, as well as mold-making/make-up disasters (one guy told a story of an idiot on a slasher flick who glued prosthetics to an actress with flooring adhesive - the poor girl was permanently scarred when the stuff burned her).

We did a bunch of plotting and planning on the trip home and now have a short list of costume ideas for next year. It will be time to get started on that pretty soon, but for now, I really need to buckle down and find a job. Back to the real world for me, sadly.

Current Mood: happy

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From:

dativesingular.livejournal.com

I wonder if I could go and then write off the costs as "professional development." A couple people on my FL have posted pics from DC and it just looks like so much fun!

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