Castle Point Anime ConventionVenue: Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
Transportation: Car (street parking), Bus, Train station nearby.
If you live in the NYC area, you might be familiar with the biggest con in the area, New York Comic Con, but for the die hard anime enthusiasts the convention season begins a few months earlier in April with Castle Point Anime Convention across the Hudson in Hoboken, NJ. Founded in 2008 and run by the Stevens Institute of Technology Anime Club, CPAC has been steadily growing year after year with more panels, more guests and (our favorite) more cosplay! AgroCraig and I spiked up our hair, grabbed our over sized swords and headed over.
We got to the gorgeous Stevens campus around noon and instantly saw hordes of cosplayers everywhere on the grounds. Music was playing through dorm windows, groups were taking pictures and excitement was everywhere. We headed up to the registration office to pick up our passes and start our day. By getting there around noon (we like sleeping in on Sundays) we figured that we'd be one of the last ones picking up our passes, but we were wrong. The registration office was on the 3rd floor of a building which had two other buildings connected to it, the line for picking up passes stretched throughout all three of the buildings. Luckily for us, the press line was maybe 2 people long, so we got out passes within minutes and immediately headed to our first panel.
MIKE MCFARLAND Q&A
I'll admit it, I'm not the biggest anime fan when it comes to the obscure series coming straight from Japan, but I have my few choice favorites and the first panel we saw brought back some great memories for me. Our first panel was a Q&A with Mike McFarland. For those not familiar with the name Mike is a voice actor and adaptive script writer that has a imdb page a mile long. He seems to have a part in almost every popular anime series coming to the states. He was Master Roshi in Dragon Ball Z Kai, Jean Havoc in Fullmetal Alchemist to just name a couple. If you're a gamer he's got that covered too! Some of his most recent titles are Paul Phoenix in Street Fighter X Tekken and Spug from The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. He also had parts in the huge hit Borderlands 2 and Halo Wars. It was nice seeing an anime mainstay such as Mike McFarland at a local convention such as this.
PAPERTAPE FOR DRESSFORMS AND ARMOR
Our next stop took us to "Paper Tape for Dressforms and Armor". For anyone into cosplay, you know making armor and masks are some of the toughest and most involved work there is. For my Cobra Commander helmet and Terr's Cyclops visor (writeups coming!) we used bondo which was very difficult to use and was heavy and rough that required hours of sanding. For those that don’t know what Paper Tape is, it’s used on a lot of packaging, so you probably have some boxes lying around that have paper tape on them. It’s basically a strip of paper, reinforced with thread or sometimes fiberglass with adhesive on the back. Using papertape is a very simple procedure. As was explained to us, just slightly wet the adhesive back and wrap it on whatever you’re making. If making armor, it’d be easiest to wrap the papertape around the part of the body you’re making the armor for and letting it dry and cutting it off (just wrap that part in plastic wrap or a plastic bag first, because the adhesive can sometimes be irritating to skin). It’s simple, pretty quick to do, and with different layers and patterns you can create almost any piece of armor or dress you need.
COSPLAY EXHIBITION
Our cosplay adventure continued with the Cosplay exhibition. Basically this was a showcase for people in costume to act out a short skit based on their characters. It seemed promising, but when only two of the performers attended, it kind of fell flat. The only thing that saved it was an amazing performance by a Stormcloak soldier from the expansive world of Skyrim. His act so was moving and passionate it really felt like we were in Skyrim being initiated into the Stormcloaks. He even handled the hecklers without hesitation. I’ve posted a video below of part of the Stormcloaks speech. I wish I had captured the entire Stormcloaks act as that was easily the best cosplay performance I’ve seen in a while.
SCIENCE IN ANIME
Our last panel of the day mixed anime with a little bit of physics and math. If you’ve ever seen a movie or show and thought, “That’s not possible”, well these guys were here to prove whether or not it was and if it was, exactly how it could be achieved in real life. One of the animes they started with was Planetes. It revolves around space garbage collectors living in space. The topic they brought up in this anime is the effect space has on bone development and the risks of being born in space. The showed a conversation that one of the characters had with a girl who was born in space. She was taller than him and seemed like her age would be around his (20-30’s) when infact she was only 12 years old. The science behind that is that without Earth’s gravity pressing down, bones would be able to grow less dense, and therefore taller albeit weaker. This was one example of anime doing science correctly. An example they ran through of anime taking liberties with science was a scene in Outlaw Star specifically having to do with monopoles. For those that don’t know what monopoles are, it’s basically something with one pole, hence mono. A regular magnet has two poles, a north and south, and even if you break it in half, the two new pieces would still have a north and south poles. The specific scene was about using a monopole to lift two adult men into the air to escape closing enemies. This is where anime geek turned into math geek as they went through a full board of math and science equations to show how much power the monopole would need to lift the two men. I won’t bore you with the equations, and also because I didn’t fully understand all the principles behind them, but basically to have enough power to lift the two grown men into the air, the monopole piece would have to wait roughly the size of a neutron star. So yea, the show took a little bit of liberty with that one. Also monopoles don’t exist in real life, or at least no one has discovered on yet.
Overall, the con was a huge success. They had a little bit for everyone, from gaming, to anime, to cosplay, to general geekiness. There was also a great turn out (larger than I expected honestly) and the atmosphere was buzzing with excited cosplayers and fans alike. I wasn’t really expecting much going into this, but I was amazing how well this was put together. I truly expect this con to be going on for years to come and continuing to grow year after year. Below is a copy of the panel listings so you can see what was going on. NGU will certainly be back as often as we can and hope to see you there! And as always, for more information, visit Castle Point Anime Convention at their website listed above and check out some more pics from the con below.
