The exhaustion was SO worth it!
Here's the run down of my day. Important stuff will be
blue, all other stuff like details will be in black ('cus I know you just want to read the good stuff but I want to write down everything!)
Tuesday: I'm super excited all day long fantasizeing about the crowd, Rob, screaming, Rob, awesome people in costume, Rob, etc. I've been lazy that last couple of days trying to get a t-shirt made to wear to the convention. I placed in my order (by phone and e-mailed the graphic) and they said that it would be ready by the end of the day on Wednesday. Awesome, just in time.
Wednesday: I'm excited. My sister and I are driving down to San Diego tonight. I come in early, 7am.
I get about 5 hours of sleep. I confirm my order for my shirt, they said that they would call me when it's finished. It shouldn't take long. It's a heat transfer. What that is is you basically print out your design (in my case a quote in all black lettering to make it easier/faster) and you iron it on to transfer it onto the shirt. So I was thinking that when they said 'end of the day' they would mean their business day. Great. So I left work early (4:30pm), went home, packed for the the next two days and when 6pm rolled around I gave them a call. No answer. 16 calls and 2 messages later I decided that I couldn't wait for them to call me back or answer the phone so I went down to the store. It was on my way to my sister's house anyway. So I arrive and they're closed! They're business hours are from 9-5:30. WTF! I call again and leave a pretty pissed off message. I'm so mad at this point. Mad and broken hearted. I was soooooo excited about my shirt and now hopes and dreams were squashed.
Defeated and playing some angry music, I drive to my sister's place. We're driving down to San Diego tonight so we wont have to tomorrow morning. About an hour into the car ride to San Diego I get a call. Guess who? That's right. The motherfucking t-shirt place. Apparently there was a 'family emergency' and he had to leave the store blahblahblah. It's 10pm when he calls claiming that he didn't have my phone number to call me earlier. He sounds really sorry but I was still pissed off and wanted to tear
someone's head off. I just don't get it. There is no excuse. It does not take an entire DAY to freakin' IRON ON a t-shirt design. They should have called me HOURS ago. Several days later I'm still pissed just remembering it. I'm leaving them really bad reviews to warn other people. This is just not how you run a business!
We leave my sister's place around 9:30pm -ish and we hit really really bad traffic 20 miles from our hotel. They shut down 3 of the 4 lanes to do mantainance! We're stuck in the god forsaken traffic for almost an hour and went probably 2 miles. Screw that shit! We exit and take surface streets further down the freeway and pick it back up again. We don't arrive at our hotel until 1 in the morning. I have to shower because I've been at work for nearly 10 hours and stuck in a car for 3-4 hours.
We finally crash at 1:30am and set our alarms for 4:30 am.Thursday:
We get up, get dressed, get ready and leave. It's 5:30am. We head to the convention center. There are a lot of people walking around and a lot of cars on the road. We make it to the parking structure and get a really good parking spot. We walk over to the front of the place and find
the line to get out badges "Line for Thursday Badges Only." It's just after
6am. The line is so long already! The people at the front of the line have camped out. There are pillows and sleeping bags and people doing their make up on the cold concrete. (Red box is where we are, green box is where it starts. Click on pic to expand)
Around
8am the line gets moving. We finally get in and
get our badges! Right after we get our badges we make a bee line for (yet another line) Hall H. There are about 1000 people in front of us. The hall seats 6500 people (it's massive). I don't remember what time it is but it's
9ish. We stand.
We wait. We munch on granola bars. We sit. We wait some more. There's a cute family in front of us. The Mom has a homemade Edward/Bella shirt and her kids are dressed up as super heroes. (The red line is the line. I'm somewhere on the squiggly grass area. Click on pic for a larger image.) We end up waiting for several hours. Luckily though it's San Diego and it was cloudy and breezy though around
12:30 when the
line starts to shuffle forward, the UV index starts to pick up and we get sweaty (sexy!).
Finally, we get inside. We're handed 3D glasses and a suvinior TRON coin. Now we gotta find seats. The front of the room is packed and there are lots of people ambling around trying to find seats too. We head on over to the other side of the room where it's not as packed. There are greeting signs on the GIANT screen that are suspended from the ceiling (the blue lines). (click on pic to expand) The green rectangle is the stage and the small red square is where I'm sitting (I have a great view of one of the screens and my super HD camera took lots of great video).
The first panel of the day is Disney: A Christmas Carol, Alice in Wonderland, and TRON. All in 3D. The Christmas Carol one looks really cool. Jim Carey plays 8 different characters. Then Tim Burton came by to talk about his Alice in Wonderland movie. He answered his questions and we ended up watching the
trailer (in 3D) three times! It looks super cool. Then they had a sneak peak at TRON. I've never seen the origional because it came out in 1981 but I remember the iconic images. The one that's coming out next year looks super neat and high tech. The leading man is super hot which doesn't hurt!
Then there was the next 3D panel featuring: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Hole and finishing with Final Destination. The first one looked cute, story and animation wise. The second looked stupid and scary. I'm sorry but I do not deal with dolls that look like clowns that come alive! Hell No. Then there was Final Destination (reminder: all this was in 3D). I don't need to see bloody flying parts flinging towards me in all it's gruesomeness. I'll pass on that.
And then there was the Summit panel featuring: Astroboy, Sorority Row, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Astroboy - blah. Sorority Row - hated it. New Moon - SQUEEEEE.
There are videos that are already uploaded on YouTube.
Click here for links to watch the Q&A. Note: this isn't my video. These guys were a lot closer and took vids of the actual people, I was further back and took vids of the screens so you get to see the actors throughout the entire Q&A (I love Robs facial expressions!)
They presented two clips of the New Moon movie.
You can read the details of the clips here. Note: I actually have these clips but I'm reluctant to post it on YouTube because I want to be nice to Summit. (aww)I love other bloggers that do all the work for me =D
Ok so after watching the second clip I pretty much fucking lost it.
I fangirled so hard. Here is the YouTube video I took after watching the last teaser scene. You can hear me scream, loudly.
Watch it here.
We stuck around Hall H to catch the Avatar panel. I assumed it was
Avatar: The Last Airbender movie. It wasn't, it was James Cameron
Avatar. Which was cool... it was very pretty. But I was expecting to see M. Night Shyamalan and Jackson Rathbone that direct and star in the movie.
Finally, when we exit the Hall it's around 5pm. We head on over the main exhibit hall were EVERY comic book store, t-shirt vendor, video game company, movie company, toy company, artist, etc. etc. are there. This place is HUGH and very overwhelming. We did a walk by through the whole room. We didn't spend time at any one booth before sensory overload and exhaustion take hold on us.
We leave.We exit the parking structure at 5:50pm, get something to eat, grab coffee and cookies and drive home. I'm soooo tired but the coffee and Linkin Park help me make it through.
Next time I'm getting a 4 days pass. You need 4 days to see everything. There is just SO much there.
Anyway, I had a blast.
I CAN'T WAIT FOR NOVEMBER 20th!!!!!!!!
I'm putting together a DVD for some co-workers (and myself) of all the video that I shot including the teaser scenes ^_-
Be nice to me and I'll make you a copy.
