con-g

Con-G 2010

Con-G 2010 was awesome!

We had 530 people this year! *happy dance*

About 350 people attended in 2009, and our estimated attendance (based on numbers we pulled from our ass) was 500, so we are very pleased. Very pleased indeed.

Highlights:

  • Real guests! We had guests this year, and the attendees loved having them! Lar deSouza, Dr. Holocaust, Featherweight, everyone was fabulous!
  • Things ran pretty smoothly! There were some bumps, but overall it ran well.
  • My parents showed up! I’m very glad that they got to see me do something like Con-G. ^_^
  • From what I hear, our panels went very well. I only got to go to one (the one I did on “Running an Anime Business”), but some sounded so awesome and I wish I could have listened!
  • People brought some amazing costumes! This means that they take our con seriously, and consider it “worth” bringing their A-game.

Lowlights:

  • Some highschool girls trashed the bathroom and I had to play the adult and talk to them about it (I did extract an apology, so I consider it a win) and clean up the bathroom.
  • Technical failure at the dance (ie iTunes hates me), but the day (and the dance) was saved by having an actual DJ in attendance who pulled out his laptop and made the dance awesome. We’d like to invite him back to DJ next year.
  • Technical failure involving the hotel’s phone lines and internet service, resulting in it taking hours to get the ATM re rented set up. The delivery guys who brought it were fabulous, though. Issue resolved with a $1.25 phone splitter and the phone line at the hotel front desk.
  • Technical failure involving the live streaming video in the green room for the Masquerade.

Most technical failures have been discussed and solutions/workarounds for next year have come up. ^_^

Here are some photos from Con-G the my parents took (like I had time to take photos):

Here’s our Flickr Gallery and Facebook Gallery.

We made some graphs to show the attendance from a number of Canadian anime conventions, starting from their first through fifth years. Our 50% growth over last year places us at the high end of average in terms of growth.

Should these we continue to follow the same trends as the other cons, we’ll likely end up with over 700 people in 2011.
Yes, this is what happens when a bunch of science nerds run a convention.

We’re aiming for bigger and better in 2011!
We’re not sure how big Con-G will get, eventually, but convention space is limited in Guelph. We have a feeling the con may become self-limiting before we have to impose a registration cap, which would be nice (’cause capping is lame). We’re not in Toronto, so we won’t ever end up as a 30k+ person convention or anything crazy like that.