The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (plenty of pics as well)

[CaptAmerica]

Well that is another con done and dusted.

 

This was my second visit to LFCC. My first was last year and I had an awesome time.

 

As the title suggests I will start with the good.

 

Overall I did enjoy the event. We met some nice people my wife had some lovely comments about her dress that she wore on the Saturday.

 

We both met some lovely guests. My wife is a big fan of the walking dead and met all 4 of the actors from the show. I went with her to get her autographs so I could take a photo of her with them. They were all lovely and chatty and really seemed to be enjoying their time meeting people.

 

We met up with a girl that started chatting to me on facebook before the event and it was great to finally meet her and see her cosplay which was amazing!

 

We were lucky enough to meet Stan on the Friday which was amazing as I don't think we could have got his autograph without that extra Friday session so thanks to whoever arranged that. 100% respect goes to Stan for doing it. At 91 I doubt I will be leaving the house much less spending 3 days at a convention doing pictures, autographs and talks.

 

I met Chase Masterson on the Saturday, she was at a dealer table selling and signing her CD Vienna. As I went past the stall I saw she was not busy so I stopped to talk and I had a lovely chat with her. I mentioned that I had tweeted her a few times and that she had replied. She was so friendly and happy it was a pleasure to meet her. She told me about her CDs which at that time I did decline to buy because as we all know there is lots to see and do and I only have so much money in my pocket. Later in the day I did go back to buy a CD and got it signed. Again she was lovely and we had another chat and I gave her a small present of a book of my grandads WW2 memoirs I recently self published which I hope she finds interesting. She seemed really touched by the gesture and was asking me lots of questions after reading the blurb on the back of the book. I just wish I had remembered to ask her for a photo but I was a bit star struck and nervous.

 

On the Sunday we cosplayed as She Hulk and Captain America. I don't know if anyone else found it but I felt that this year less people were asking for a photo with cosplayers. Not sure if it was because the show was busier than last year.

 

 

The guy that was running Stan Lees photo shoot on Sunday morning was AMAZING! I think his name might have been Keith. He had glasses and was organising the queue and shouting out numbers and was checking to make sure that the right numbered tickets were coming forwards. There was probably over 1000 people trying to get in for the photo shoot and he did an amazing job.

 

On the Sunday I had a photo with Terry Farrell. She was so happy and was being lovely with all of the people that had turned up for a photo. She was getting really close and cuddly with all the fans. She loved my cosplay and was so bubbly and amazed by it.

 

After the photo shoot I got her to autograph the picture and again she was amazed by the costume and loved it and was really flirty with me and called me cute and managed to make me go red in front of my wife who was laughing and joining in on the conversation. It was an awesome moment and I will love that memory forever!

 

We made it to the Stan Lee talk and that was excellent, we did grab a seat by a speaker so we heard everything that was going on. Stan is amazing, he works an audience so well and had some great stories and his comic timing is great!

 

We managed to buy a few things off the dealers and they were all friendly.

 

Over all I had a positive experience of the weekend.

 

Now onto the bad.....

 

Saturday. What happened? How did the hall get that crowded? The early bird line was massive! If there was this many pre sold tickets this should have given the impression that Saturday was going to be heaving.

It was too hot and too full. There was not enough volunteers to deal with the amount of people at photo shoots and autograph lines.

 

Now onto the ugly.

 

Back to Saturday again. The staffing for the queue to get in was appalling. There were no barriers, no signs more than about 50 feet from the entrance doors. The queue that I joined for early bird entrance was around the back of the building and coming back again. There were coaches, cars and van squeezing past the EB queue. How no one was hit or run over I don't know. This is totally unacceptable. Regardless of whose fault it is this is truly awful and needs to be addressed for future events.

You need to pay the money and get proper metal barriers which contain the queue and then you can use the space outside the venue more efficiently as you only had a single queue snaking everywhere. With barriers you can zigzag it to compress the queue and safely contain the queue.

 

You also need staff at every point that the queue breaks because of doors to stop the massive amount of queue jumping that there was to get in.

 

The hall was far too full and I would hate to think what would have happened if there had been an emergency. I have seen posts that people said fire doors were chained shut, I did not see this myself but if this is true then someone should be in a lot of trouble as I am sure that is illegal.

 

There seemed to be no regard for the guests or the paying public's health and safety.

 

Inside the hall there needs to be proper barriers up for the queue lines. The sticky tape on the floor just looks cheap and unprofessional. You need a way to stop people just walking through a busy queue line just to get somewhere else.

There needed to be about twice or three times as many staff at the photo shoots and at the stages to deal with ticket and the queue.

 

The program raffle just seems like a con. There were about 200 numbers written down on bits of paper for people to try and see if they had won.

There were 1000 prizes so how was there so few numbers by the time the raffle was closed on the Sunday at about 4pm? Also I hear that some numbers were called out during the prize giving event and if the person was not there the prize was just given out

This again is totally unacceptable. I bough a program in good faith that this would be properly run and that things would be fair. It looks like it was either a total scam to make money or zero thought had been put in to how to run it.

I would like to know if showmasters had ever got a licence to run that sort of event?

 

We also ran into one of two bad volunteers and I do feel maybe its time to start paying for proper event staff to deal with the queues and people as some of the volunteers were not up to the job. No disrespect to them I feel they were probably dropped in the deep end. I have worked in a job dealing with the general public so I know how hard that can be and I feel it was very unfair to expect them to perform an almost impossible talk. I have been thinking about volunteering at a SM event but I am not so sure now as I don't get the impression they are properly trained or looked after.

 

This again with the lack of proper barriers makes the show look cheap and makes it look like corners are cut just to make as much profit as possible.

 

I will just end in saying that I will probably be coming to future events as I did overall enjoy it but there is a lot of room for improvement. I will also be posting this on some other forums that I post on so even if showmasters think it should be removed it will still be on the internet.

 

Regards to one and all.

Edited July 15, 2014 by CaptAmerica