The Sheraton pool during the day. It's really pretty!
And since I was up, I thought I would throw on some clothes and try to make the 10am Doctor Who panel, which was with GWho/Torchwood propmaster Nicholas John Robatto. It was in my hotel and I was nearly 40 minutes early for it so I figured no problem. Nope, huge line. And no cell reception. So I couldn't reply to texts inviting me to brunch or make sure Doug got my text that I'd gone to this panel (he'd gone running). So I entertained myself my reading Janine's book on my phone and hoping I would get in. And it ended up being no problem. And I even got a decent seat.
Baby Eleven:
Robatto with the ray guns he makes now.
The panel itself was awesome. Basically, he was in the right place at the right time with the right skills and sort of lucked into prop work with the Who reboot. He also worked his ass off (since he was young and was in a place in his life to do so) and it's amazing how fast he turned some of the props around.
He makes all the sonic screwdrivers and I think he even designed Eleven's. He's now got his own company so he has more autonomy. And he's learned to just show up with the prop right before shooting - it gives people less time to make changes. If you show up with it too early, people want to change things for no good reason. But now, since he's been doing it long enough and he's trusted, he's able to do that more.
The worst job was apparently installing stuff on the TARDIS, the one 9 and 10 used. It has a really small hatchway to crawl through and it's tight to work in there. Although I couldn't help thinking, "You're working on the TARDIS!" It reminded me of when Episode I came out and we all bought those toy Darth Maul double edged light sabers, and there was so defect, and you could send away for some corrective thing to install on it, and my friend noted someone in a forum saying "I get to install something on my lightsaber? I'm more and more like a Jedi every day!" :D
Apparently Matt Smith is super clumsy. On his first day of shooting, Robatto delivered the sonic and headed home, and then got a call to turn around and come back because Matt had broken the sonic right away. And supposedly someone else turned to Robatto and said "This guy could break a rubber ball!" So after that he made the part of the sonic that broke in one piece instead of two. And they started taking the sonic away from Matt between takes!
He also talked about traveling with the props (he had a ray gun and two sonics in a little case) and how nervewracking it is going through security when it flies. Frankly, I'm amazed they let him through, because Janine's husband had a sci-fi ray gun belt buckle confiscated. Even though it didn't remotely resemble an actual gun.
One of the track mods came around with all the props so we could photograph them, which was super nice.
He sells the guns now - isn't it pretty?
Eleven's sonic - this is the real thing. It was borrowed from Robatto for Children in Need because they needed a sonic, though he's not sure if it ended up on the screen or not.
And here is Ten's sonic, though he said it was a replica. ie, probably not screenused, though I assume he made it just like the others.
It was a really interesting panel and it was fun hearing him talk about all the Torchwood/Who props he made. (He made the glove for Torchwood too!)
After that, I decided to try to catch the Barrowman panel, since I'd missed his two previous ones - and this one had the actor who plays Rhys and Jane Espensen (who wrote Miracle Day). I'd wanted to see her panel too and hadn't made it. So it was an interesting panel. John Barrowman did a backflip onto the stage when he was introduced. Though I think we were the only panel of three that he didn't moon. Even though I didn't watch all of Miracle Day, I still enjoyed seeing the three of them talk.
After the panel was lunch - a few of us met up in the food court and crowded around a small table. And I managed to see Betsy's amazing Idris costume, which I missed seeing last year. She did such an amazing job on it.
I'd managed to miss all the Trek panels, so Doug agreed to go to Levar Burton's Reading Rainbow panel with me. There was already a huge line (40 minutes before) and it ran outside and into the hot sun. But we braved it out and got in. This room was smaller than the big Marriott ballroom and I don't think we would have gotten in if we hadn't waited.
Levar was really funny, one of the questioners DID bring up Troy from Community (so yay!), and his funniest quip was his answer to the guy who asked if they considered any controversial books or did they decide not to do any controversial books, and he replied "We looked at Mein Kampf...and decided there weren't enough pictures." Oh, Geordi.
The best part though, was the guy who sang a bit of the theme song in telling Levar how much he would get excited as a kid when he'd hear the theme come on, and the Levar was like "Can we do this please?" And the whole room sang the theme song, which was awesome. I only got the 2nd half of it on video because I was too slow. But it was so awesome.
Then Doug and I headed back to the hotel. We were going to change into Wash and Kaylee, but his Wash jumpsuit is way too big on him now. So he settled for just wearing the new screenaccurate shirt over the Browncoat shirt he was already wearing.
I put on Kaylee, and then we headed over to the Marriott to try to get into the Lord of the Rings panel, which had John Rhys Davies, Billy Boyd, and Craig Parker on it. We were able to just walk right in and sit in the back, so yay.
It was entertaining and my fav part was when someone asked if they could play any person living, dead, fiction, etc, who would it be. And JRD gave a long answer about some famous Greek who he found fascinating and then when it went over to Billy Boyd, he leaned over to his mic and just said "Batman." LOL And then Craig Parker said, "Robin". It was really funny. Though poor JRD was like, "I'd like to play Batman too!" It was very cute.
After that panel, Doug headed off to meet Mike for dinner. I waited with him for a bit and then caught Janine, and then I had to run off to meet Jen to judge the YA Lit costume contest.
It was really fun and there were some great costumes. Everyone really did a terrific job and it was clear that all of them had put a lot of work into their costumes. One of the two little Harry Potters actually had prescription HP glasses. Awesome.
I thought this Boggart Snape and Trewlawny were really great. They had documentation and had really tried to get as close to screen accurate as they could, even hand-knotting the fringe on Trelawny's outfit!
This guy made his own Quidditch pads, robe, and broom!
There were also three Umbridges who all looked amazing.
The judging took a long time - we didn't get done til well after 8 and I was starving by this time. I grabbed whatever I could in the food court and headed back to the room. I ate and Amber came over to hang out, and then I changed into Arwen and we headed to the Yule Ball to catch the announcement of the costume contest.
Raj made a great TARDIS:
Sadly, I did not get a pic of Jen's amazing Labyrinth David Bowie. She looked amazing. I also got to hang out with Vera a bit and admire her amazing Hunger Games dress again.
After the contest was announced, Doug, Amber and I headed back to the room so I could change and then we went over to the Marriott. We visited Yvette's party. The funniest bit was when there came a knock at the door and four or five people walked in. None of us knew them and it became clear they didn't know us. I guess they'd been looking for some friend's party and mistaken this room for it. I thought for a minute that they were going to be drunk assholes. But they actually weren't. And when the tatooed guy holding the beer learned that Yvette's husband was German, he started speaking German because apparently he'd lived there for a while. It was highly amusing. And it turned out to be one of the girls' birthdays. So we sang to her. Then it was time to head over to Caitlin's suite to watch the Masquerade, which Caitlin and Kathy and some other folks we knew were in. (A Captain America USO skit) The Masquerade was way better than usual. There were a lot of really good costumes (a girl in a good steampunk costume with wings that were deployed via an iphone app she wrote, a larger than life T-Rex skeleton puzzle, Condorman, USO, and one of my favs, the Dalek cosplaying Doctor Who who commmanded the audience to applaud. "You will applaud! Applaud!")
We were exhausted after that, so we headed back to the room when the Masquerade replay was over. We managed to meet Amber for breakfast on Monday, but that's about all we had time for.
Though I noted this sign:
The best Con overlap ever. This happened at least once before and the results were hilarious.
And that was about it! I'm going to make one more post with some of the pics I stole from other people of the weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment