Events Archive: Ozine Fest ’10

Day One (Chann)

It was the first day of Ozine Fest ’10. Along with my otaku friends (the Poa clan and Chris Sy) we arrived at the event earlier than usual, around 10:45 in the morning. Rushing towards the fifth floor of Megamall to buy our tickets, I was stunned because it was my first time to see a long line of people piling up towards the ticket booths of the event. Seeing my reaction from this, my friend tzia_n who was also lining up to buy his ticket that morning, enlightened me that it was just normal seeing this many people because it was just the start of the convention. Having realized this, gave me a surprising conclusion from all this years of attending various anime conventions that it was only my first time attending a convention this early because normally, me and my buddies would go to conventions during the afternoon after attending Church. LOL.

Moving on, as we went inside we noticed that the space for the merchandise booths were segregated away from the other activities and sections of the convention. This gave us the impression that the organizers did great in dividing and allocating the areas unlike from previous conventions that was really suffocating and skimpy. But as we went on, we also noticed that there were 2 stages inside the convention hall. We had no idea on the purpose of the 2 stages because it would be hard for us to focus our attention and efforts in documenting the event if there are two events taking place at the same time. But this mystery will soon be unfolded come this Sunday during the cosplay competition. On the other hand, we have observed that there were a lot of cosplayers that attended today knowing that there was no cosplay competition set during today’s set of events. It just seems that there is really a growing population of cosplayers and how Japanese culture has greatly influenced many Filipinos. “_“  Having checked the different areas of the convention, cvhaoson suddenly appeared and asked me, together with my buddies and tzia_n to join the CS, DotA and Starcraft tournament that was also held inside the convention. Having his magic and his appeal cast upon us, we all agreed to join him in his quest to participate in the activity. But at the end of the day, we all did not get our chance to raise our flag on the battlefield as there were no other teams who registered to fight us on the CS tournament. Apparently most of the groups signed in under the DotA tournament. However we were a bit lucky to no humiliate ourselves for losing the game as we had already predicted an early defeat due to the fact that 2 of our teammates never played counter strike and that the 3 of us were already retired in playing the game.

In the end, I think we all did have fun and are also looking forward to this Sunday’s day 3 of the Ozine Fest’10. Click Here to view the pics taken during day 1. Due to some difficulties of using my friends digicam (most of the pics were blurry), some of the pictures for day 1 will be posted by tzia_n.

Pictures taken by bossmac‘s friend coffeebug are placed here.

 

Day Two (tzia_n)

Ozine Fest 2010… Bigger, better, but still delayed Actually, I’ll cut them some slack. Ozine Fest 2010, as far as the first two days go, is one hell of a convention. There were some logistical problems, but well, those things happen…

The place is big… huge to be precise. There were two stages, and activities were sometimes held simultaneous because of this. There were lots of open spaces on the grounds, so that’s really good for the cosplayers and the photographers, and to a certain extant, your average otaku.

The place was still jam-packed though, and I expect it’ll be much more packed tomorrow (3rd day). Speaking of which, judging from the first two days, my expectations are quite high

As far as the group cosplay goes, I must say that in general, things are improving. Most of the groups are now entertaining. Sure, there were still some performances that were quite painful to watch (at least the contestants are having fun with it), but the quality is good in general. I’m most impressed with Team Suna to be honest

Pictures for day two are here and here.

 

Day Three (Chann)

 

Overall (cvhaoson)

This has been the most tiring con I’ve been but it was all good. Ozine Fest 2010 was better compared to previous Ozines I’ve been to (this is my third I think). Surprisingly, there were a lot of old anime cosplays, I’ve seen the likes of kenshin himura of Samurai X, Yusuke Urameshi of Yu Yu Hakusho and a group of girls who cosplayed the whole core sailor moon characters. There seemed to be a sudden decline in L and Cloud cosplays which was really cool cause I got really sick and tired of those characters especially when I keep on seeing them on cons.

The other thing I liked during Ozine Fest was the sheer amount of things happening all at once. The two stages that were setup at the two megatrade halls made it kind of hard for just one person to cover the whole event so we had to pool our manpower (and cam power too) to make sure that we can get as much as we can from the event.

I’ve been really tired the past three days due to the amount of walking (and traveling) I’ve been doing but then again I got the satisfaction of being able to see as much as I can. There were  more people cosplaying and some had really good costumes. I actually liked this con because the cosplayers were doing something different (FINALLY!).

A few notable things I’ve seen during the whole event were:

• The Suna cosplay group- FINALLY SOMEBODY thought of using propsmen to make the sfx (kinda) of temari’s wind and gaara’s sand ninjutsus…
• War Machine cosplay- There was one war machine cosplay who actually had a working gatling gun. The gun was actually spinning at the command of the cosplayer so it was really uber cool.
• Kid Yoshimitsu cosplay- There was a kid who cosplayed yoshimitsu. The costume was really awesome but what took the cake is that I saw the kid afterwards with the headgear removed… The Yoshimitsu cosplayer was a girl kid… so major win right there
• Lan game competition- the CS was kinda fail because our team backed out because there were no competitors that time. I wasn’t able to check if there cs teams during day 2 but then it wasn’t really a surprise that there were no registrants there because the current Filipino game fave is DotA

tzia_n failed to mention that some of the pics he uploaded during day 3 were taken by me. Though I’m not proud of those shots because a lot of them were blurred, I never got the hang of his camera so I decided to just stop taking pics from it and switched to bossmac‘s canon camera (the shots hopefully would be upload later).

So far, among the cons I’ve attended, I am considering it the best anime con as of this moment– I hope the succeeding cons can do better.

BTW, for all the shots I have during ozine fest here’s the link.