April 10, 2011

The Stevens anime club keeps improving on their previous year’s work.  For this year’s iteration of the Castle Point Anime Convention, they were able to secure more space. And that’s never a bad thing.

As we took the PATH train this year, we were able to see the advertisements on the walls for the convention.  More people came and there was a lot more space allotted to the convention for activities.  The artist alley and dealers room were moved out of the old gym and into an even larger space in a different gym.  They used the old gym to run a cosplay chess match during the day and set it up for a dance at night.  The only downside in terms of room placement was that they moved the main events room to another building that was out of the way.  Even if it did hold more people, it didn’t seem to attract that many.

Even with that, we will continue to attend these sorts of small conventions.  What’s great about small cons like CPAC is that people are able to run panels for the first time and grow from there.  The downside of small conventions is that if people don’t step up to participate the convention will suffer.

The masquerade was the prime example of this.  We missed the masquerade completely because we were maybe a half hour late.  Not only that, they just ran the costume parade right afterward instead of keeping it on schedule, so we missed at least half of that as well.  From what we were told by people in the audience, there were only a few participants in the masquerade.   Hopefully next year more people will participate in running panels and events at the convention to help it grow in content rather than just size.