Pinoy Otaku Festival 2014 Fantasm: Close but No Cigar

Written by General Miss A

May 29, 2014

8

We covered the 3rd Pinoy Otaku Festival dubbed as Fantasm and we checked if the event did meet its expectation or not.

Pinoy Otaku Festival’s Fanstasm did not exceed expectations as a cosplay event, the whole thing didn’t go smoothly, and given by the location more or less it wasn’t the best venue to hold a cosplay event.

Some points that made Fantasm less of a success:

  • The hot weather was making the venue like a hot oven as there was no air condition in the theme park area, most of the cosplayers and their guests are seen hanging around inside the theater lobby. People who aren’t attendees of the con took the opportunity to snap some photos with the cosplayers seen lounging around.
  • There wasn’t much booths as expected, there were only around 6 to 7 booths present (excluding the front desk). Most of them are just tables with the exhibitors’ wares displayed, there was a gaming booth but most of the time who stayed there, took advantage of the free seating. The tables rented out came from the nearby barangay hall due to miscommunication from the event organizers and the mall administration.
  • There were a lot of people in the pool area, but it doesn’t look like the Fantasm attendees didn’t take the opportunity to take a swim to cool down as most of them just loitered beside the steel fences.
  • Faulty equipment: 2 broken stereo sets and counting, they had to get a new one.
  • There was no stage lighting, after sunset it was already hard to watch the cosplayers perform without any stage lights to emphasize their performance. We could say the same during the battle of the bands segment.
  • The program flow was so terrible that the last segment took longer than expected. Half of the crowd already left because they were getting impatient and most of the cosplayers endured the heat while waiting.

 4

Aside from these negative points, there was some good that came out of the event:

  • Everyone was interacting with one another. There was a good amount of hi’s and hello’s during the event.
  • Since the venue was at a mall theme park, most of the cosplayers took advantage of the venue’s facilities for their mini-photoshoots.
  • The children in their costumes are quite the show stopper. It was fun watching them.

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There is a huge lesson to learn from this. Planning and managing an event is no easy task, and executing a well ironed program flow (with alternative plans for back-up) is key for a successful event.

To NCPH, we hope this doesn’t discourage you from holding future events. We wish you all the best.

(Apologies to the blurry images, these were taken from a video)

The Aftermath Video will be uploaded next week…

Facebook Comments

3 Comments

  1. David D'Angelo

    Thanks for this insightful article. There are indeed flaws and we acknowledge it, however personally we have tried our best considering that 2 weeks before the event the venue suddenly told us that they cannot provide lights and sounds, tables, as well as a projector. We tried our best to look for a good sound but it busted, still we manage to finish the program within mall hours. The time constraint was given by the venue despite us informing them it was not possible to end at 7pm.

    Our sound system arrived late so we have to adjust and well as much as we would like to be ontime there are things beyond our control.

    The venue is hot but I think it was not as hot as the other venues of past open air events we had been too. There was also a ventillation maintenance that coincided that day.

    Despite all of this we tried our best to give everyone a wortwhile event.

    Reply
  2. David D'Angelo

    Plus this one is a free event with tons of things we innovated including an activity card, a free bus ride for VIPs and guests, uniting 17 plus organizations, introducing a realism-based cosplay competition, and managing to successfully inspire Otakus and congoers to reach out by donating school supplies to our Balik Eskwela Project.

    We have worked as much as we can but again there are things we had been surprised at the last minute. Nevertheless, we appreciate these feedbacks and view them as a tool to improve our next events. After all we do it for you and not only for us or for money’s sake.

    Thank you everyone for your support and trust. Arigatou gosaimasu!

    Reply
  3. Chad

    Thanks for the clarification, though it’s sad that the event didn’t met much of its expectation, we hope that you will be able to host a good one next year

    Wishing you the best!

    Reply

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