Win 2 tickets to OBLIVION staring Tom Cruise on the BIGGEST screen in SoFL at AutoNation IMAX Theater!

Our friends at the Museum of Discovery and Science have given us 4 pairs of tickets (8 tickets total) to give away for OBLIVION in IMAX 3D. These are run of engagement passes, and are good for any screening at the theatre. See OBLIVION in 3D on the BIGGEST screen in South Florida at AutoNation® IMAX Theater.

Winners will be chosen randomly Thursday, April 18 @ 9:00pm

Tom Cruise stars in Oblivion, an original and groundbreaking cinematic event from the director of TRON: Legacy and the producer of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. On a spectacular future Earth that has evolved beyond recognition, one man’s confrontation with the past will lead him on a journey of redemption and discovery as he battles to save mankind.
Oblivion opens Thursday, April 18. The first 100 fans that arrive for the 8:00 p.m. show receive an IMAX exclusive poster that features an original piece of OBLIVION artwork designed and signed by the director Joseph Kosinski. Call 954.713.0930 for tickets or get them at the Box Office. Show times at http://www.mods.org/IMAX/showtimes.htm

JURASSIC PARK 3D TICKET GIVEAWAY

Our friends at the Museum of Discovery and Science have given us 10 pairs of tickets (20 tickets total) to give away for the special preview screening of JURASSIC PARK in IMAX 3D on Thursday April 4, 2013 @ 7:30pm. See JURASSIC PARK 3D on the BIGGEST screen in South Florida at AutoNation® IMAX Theater.

Winners will be chosen randomly Tuesday, April 2 @ 9:00pm

Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking masterpiece, Jurassic Park, has been remastered into IMAX 3D® format and opens at 10:00pm, Thursday, April 4, 2013, at the AutoNation® IMAX® 3D Theater. You can win tickets to a special 7:30pm screening on Thursday night! Buy Advance tickets to regular screenings by calling 954.713.0930. Show times at http://www.mods.org/IMAX/showtimes.htm


JURASSIC PARK: AN IMAX 3D EXPERIENCE
Win two free tickets to an advance screening happening 7:30pm, Thursday, April 4, 2013
Winners can pick up their tickets starting 6:00pm at the AutoNation IMAX 3D Theater lobby

JURASSIC PARK 3D opens to the public Thursday, April 4, 2013 @ 10:00pm. Giant 3D dinosaurs will be stomping on to the BIGGEST screen in South Florida! Steven Spielberg’s epic Jurassic Park returns to the big screen for a special 3D engagement in IMAX® theatres worldwide simultaneous with the film’s wide release beginning April 4, 2013, to commemorate the movie's 20th Anniversary. 

Jurassic Park: An IMAX 3D Experience will be showing for a special two-week engagement at the AutoNation IMAX® 3D Theater, home of the BIGGEST screen in South Florida.

With his re-mastering of this epic film into a state-of-the-art 3D format, Steven Spielberg introduces the three-time Academy Award®-winning blockbuster to a new generation of moviegoers and allows longtime fans to experience the world he envisioned in a way that was unimaginable during the film’s original release.

Jurassic Park tells the story of a wealthy entrepreneur who secretly creates a theme park on a remote island featuring living dinosaurs cloned from prehistoric DNA. Before opening the attraction to the public, he invites a top paleontologist, a paleobotanist, a mathematician/theorist, and his two eager grandchildren to experience the park -- and help calm anxious investors. However, their park visit is anything but tranquil as the park's security system breaks down, the prehistoric creatures break out, and the excitement builds to surprising results. “Jurassic Park is the quintessential film for fans to experience in IMAX 3D,” said Nikki Rocco, President of Distribution, Universal Pictures. “Jurassic Park was groundbreaking when it was originally released, and the IMAX 3D Experience® will allow today’s audiences to become fully immersed in one of the most breathtaking epics Universal has ever released.”

Starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Attenborough, the film is based on the novel by Michael Crichton and is produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen. Jurassic Park is rated PG-13 for intense science fiction terror. The IMAX release of Jurassic Park has been digitally re-mastered into the image and sound quality of the IMAX 3D Experience® with proprietary IMAX DMR® (Digital Re-mastering) technology. The crystal-clear images, coupled with IMAX’s customized theatre geometry and powerful digital audio, create a unique environment that will make audiences feel as if they are in the motion picture itself. Jurassic Park is rated PG-13 for intense science fiction terror.

After a brief hiatus...

It's been awhile since i've posted a new blog post. Basically getting everything together for Animate! Miami and Florida Supercon at the same time took priority, with every spare moment tied up actually putting the shows together, and not much time to write about it. Going to try and be a little more frequent with these posts.

Animate! Miami was a success. We had over 5,400 unique individual attendees to the event, which was well above what we were projecting for the first time event. That number does include all the guests, staff, vendors, artists, etc... but every person in the building only counts once. Some shows use turnstile numbers (i.e. a 3 day badge counts as 3 admissions). I don't like to count numbers that way. Based on the success, we're going to do it again next year... so planning for Animate! Miami 2014 (January 17-19) has begun. No idea what we're gonna do for that show yet... or who the guests will be. I have some ideas, and hopefully things will start to come together over the next few months. I'd love to have some stuff announced by Supercon.

While we're on the subject of Supercon... Everything is moving full steam ahead for the big show.  Lots of guests have been announced, with even more to come. We're getting ready to head up to Megacon in Orlando next week to do a little promoting. I just got back from a trip to Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, which should yield some new guest announcements soon, and after Megacon it's up to Boston for Pax East. ECCC in Seattle was massive. The show has exploded since the last time I was there in 2005 and probably had something like 65,000 people there. It's probably the 3rd largest comic-con in the country now. My trip to Pax will be my first one there. I've been to Boston several times for Boston Comic-Con and Anime Boston... but never for Pax. But, we're really trying to grow the video game aspect of Supercon... so I need to get to more big video game events and do some networking.

On the fun side of things, Mervyn McKoy has been working on some mascot art for Supercon. I asked him to do some stuff revolving around this years show. The first few are G.I. Joe / Cobra images. Since we have Sgt Slaughter coming to Supercon this year... as well as Morgan Lofting (voice of the original Baroness), Gregg Berger (Spirit, Cutter, Firefly, Ripcord, Sparks, Motorviper, Col. Brekhov), Dan Gilvezan (Slipstream, Beach Head) and a few more guests in the works, we have a bit of a GI Joe reunion going on. On top of all that, Cobra Commander is one of the stars of Florida Super Championship Wrestling. Here's a look at the images of the Dude as Cobra Commander and his sister as The Baroness. Mervyn did mock ups of the Dude in both Cobra Commander outfits.

The second images are of the Dude and his sister as Power Rangers... in honor of the 20th Anniversary Reunion we have planned for Supercon this year. We have six cast members from the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, including Jason David Frank (Green Ranger), David Yost (Blue Ranger), Walter Jones (Black Ranger), Richard Horvitz (Alpha-5), Robert Axelrod (Lord Zed) and Barbara Goodson (Rita Repulsa). We've got a few more designs being finished, and should be premiering them in the next few weeks. I'm considering making some promotional trading cards with the Dude images this year. We've done it in the past... and I always like making stuff like that. We'll see.... 

THE HOBBIT @ IMAX 3D TICKET GIVEAWAY

Our friends at the Museum of Discovery and Science have given us 10 pairs of tickets (20 tickets total) to give away for the special opening night screening of THE HOBBIT in IMAX 3D on Wed., December 12 @ 8:00pm. See THE HOBBIT on the BIGGEST screen in South Florida at AutoNation® IMAX Theater.

Winners will be chosen randomly Monday, December 10 @ 9:00pm

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY 3D is the first in a trilogy of films adapted from the enduringly popular masterpiece, The Hobbit, by J.R.R.Tolkien. Buy Advance tickets by calling 954.713.0930. Show times at http://www.mods.org/IMAX/showtimes.htm

Evolution of Mascots and Logos - Part 6

Here's the most recent mockups of the new Animate! Miami mascots, including being paired with the Florida Supercon Mascot, Hercules Jr.

Evolution of Mascots and Logos - Part 5

Ok... now that we've gotten all the FSC logo stuff out of the way, let's look at Animate! Miami.

When I started to plan Animate! Miami I made the initial announcements without a logo or mascot. The first thing I started to work on was the mascot. My initial thought was to use Gertie the Dinosaur in some way or another.

In case you've never heard of Gertie, here's what the wikipedia entry says:
"Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 American animated short film by Winsor McCay. Although not the first animated film, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films", such as those of Blackton and Cohl, and makes it the predecessor to later popular cartoons such as those by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer. The film was also the first to be created using keyframe animation."

Since we're doing an animation/anime show, I thought it would be cool to harken back to the earliest days of animation and pay homage to the first animated character with personality. Plus, who doesn't love dinosaurs? If you want to watch the full original Gertie cartoon, here it is on You Tube.

Once I had the idea of Gertie, the question was what direction to go in. Did I want to keep things consistant with our existing Supercon imagery, or did I want to go in a different direction?

During this time, we started working on the logo for the show too. My artist friend, Ben Temples (owner of www.gimmicktees.com) talked it over with me and worked up a few quick ideas. There wasn't a huge amount of back and forth before we went final with this logo.

I liked that it was very animated (no pun intended) and had Miami in a secondary smaller font. I also liked that it was its own separate logo and could never be confused with the Supercon logo. Back to the mascot, I was still conflicted. I thought about an open mascot contest for a few days, but decided against it. I worked out in my head that while I wanted something different than Herc jr., maybe "Gertie" could be someone that existed in the same universe. With that in mind I contacted Deleon, my go to artist and discussed it with him. I told him I wanted something similar to Gertie in his style, which would match up with the Herc jr. style.

Based on our initial conversations, Deleon came back to me with these rough concept sketches.

 

You'll see that he came back to me with a couple of different thoughts and I thought he came very close to what I was looking for right off the bat. I liked the dino in #9 and #10... which fit my vision for Gertie. I also liked the dino in #6 and #7. Maybe he could be a pal for Gertie? I also liked including Herc   jr. in #9 and #10. I responded to Deleon to go further and based on my notes, he came back with this next test.

I was very happy with all of these, and gave him the go ahead to go to color with these guys and that I wanted to get final images of Gertie alone, Gertie with the mini dino together, Gertie and Herc jr. together, Herc jr. and mini dino together and one with all 3 characters together. 

The next set of images I got back from Deleon had Gertie and the mini dino colored. Here's Gertie, which I thought looked great and signed off on.

And here are 2 versions of the mini dino in 2 different colors. I liked the purple one better than the brown one, but there was concern from Sandy that this purple might clash with Herc jr.'s colors. 

Based on that, Deleon darkened him a little and came back with this version, which I think works a little better.

So, now that i've approved the colors, Deleon is working on final versions of the new mascot(s). I'm getting something very close to my original idea and I think Deleon tool my idea and made it better by giving life to the character and making him fit in our existing universe. Plus, we'll have a second dino character, which I wouldn't have thought of without him. 

So, now we have our logo and we're almost there with our mascots. There's enough of a difference that people shouldn't confuse the show with Florida Supercon, while still keeping them together in a tangible way. I'll post the final versions of the mascots when we have them ready!

Evolution of Mascots and Logos - Part 4

After the introduction of the new Florida Supercon logo and mascot for the June 2009 show, the next big event we held was Animation Supercon 2009. This was Anime Supercon 4 with a slight name change to reflect the focus on more than just anime, but animation as a whole.

We took the FSC logo and mascot and used them as the basis for all the marketing materials for the new ASC. Basically the same collegiate font for the logo, with the FSC mascot front and center in everything.

In 2010 we continued using the same imagery for Florida Supercon 5. Also, in addition to Herc jr., we used his sister (Super Connie) and father (Zeus) for a some marketing.

 Here's a look at the flyer/brocure for Florida Supercon 2010, with usage of the logo and mascot

We also started to get creative. Deleon worked up a few images of Herc jr. in cosplay. The idea being that Herc jr. is a kid who likes to put together his costumes from stuff he finds around the house.

Here's a look at the two program guides from FSC 2010. They're based on the covers for X-Men #1 and Avengers #4, which is why the logos are not the official FSC logo, but notice we squeezed Herc jr. into both of them as a main character.

Also in 2010, Khoi Pham did a piece of art for the show featuring Iron Man and Herc jr.

The mascot and logo are still the same... so for 2011 and 2012 it was just more usage of the same characters and logo. Here are some of the highlights from the past 2 years. 

First off, here are three more images of Herc jr. by Deleon, featuring him in cosplay as Dr. Who and as Goku (Dragonball). The third image is a homage to the cover of the new Action Comics #1, with Herc jr. as Superman.

In 2012 we held an art contest for artists to send us their versions of our mascot. Here are winners from that contest.

The 2011 FSC program guide covers

 The 2012 FSC program guide covers

Evolution of Mascots and Logos - Part 3

If memory serves me right, the new Florida Supercon logo of 2009 had its origins as a conversation between me and another convention promoter at Megacon (February 2009) in Orlando. He remarked to me that my use of FSC as the name of the show made us sound like a college and not a convention. His comment stuck with me, and I thought it would be fun to make a collegiate style shirt for the show for people to wear. Here's a look at the flyer we went to Megacon with in 2009. Notice the same logo from 2007 and 2008

Also, here's an animated gif ad that ran on a few websites for the 2009 show using the old logo

Following the conversation we moved ahead to work on the new logo. I thought it would give us a community feel and would be slightly ironic. When we started working on the shirt idea, we ended up deciding to just run with the idea as a new logo to replace the old puffy logo. Notice the one characteristic from the original Florida Supercon. The lightning bolt... the one constant.

Here are two early examples of the new logo in use. The first is a poster we printed to promote the show and the second one is an ad that ran in the Jacon 2009 (Orlando Anime Convention) program guide. We've basically stuck with the collegiate logo since then, with no plans to change it.

Also in 2009, leading up to Florida Supercon 4 we finally got a real mascot. I started discussing the mascot idea with Deleon Walters, the artist that did our 2008 program guide cover. We knocked some ideas around and ended up with Hercules jr., the current Florida Supercon mascot. Herc jr. made his first appearance with the 2009 show.

Here's Herc jr. in action with the new FSC logo on the program guide cover for FSC 2009

Art by Doug Mahnke. Inks and Colors by Deleon Walters.