Allow me to open this blog post with a well known fact about myself. I am a big geek. There I said it. It is the computer age, geeks are in... right? Well, anyway, I don’t care because I am one regardless of the fashionable status. So today, I went to the London Film and Comic Con at the Earl’s Court exhibition hall, and had a really good time.
I arranged to meet my old University friend, and house mate, Carl Mitchell at Earl’s Court train station at 10:30 am-ish this morning and went into the convention hall as soon as the ticket price lowered at 11 am. We spent the first hour looking around two or three of the rows of merchandising before we descended on the free screening of the excellent Lord of the Rings fan film, The Hunt for Gollum.
Very impressive piece of work that was thrown together over the course of two years for the very affordable price of £2000 and a large amount of love for the source material. But don’t just take my word for it, head on over to their site and take a look for yourself. After the Q+A session Carl and I noticed that the head of CGI for the film looked quite familiar, and it turned out that he had been at University on the same course as we had been. There was brief discussion between the three of us and an exchange of e-mail addresses, and hopefully we will get in touch with each other soon and collaborate on something.
After that we hit the final aisles of merchandise (there was an awful lot) and then hunger got the better of us. I had a decent enough hot dog, although it was slightly lacking in the ketchup department and Carl had an apparently not very nice portion of chips. We then went to investigate the option of the autograph section. After a lengthy wait, we finally managed to secure the autograph of the very pretty and talented Jewel Strait (Kaylee, from Firefly), although to Carl’s annoyance she wrote ‘stay shiny’ on mine and not on his. He also met with Danny John Jules (The Cat, from Red Dwarf), while I visited the armoury stand and purchased a replica of the Master Sword from the Legend of Zelda video game.
I had a really good time, although I am quite disappointed that there weren’t more artists offering commissions, or at least reasonably cheap sketches as I was hoping to get a couple of my Animus characters sketched, but I did get the e-mail address of one of the artists so I will be dropping him a line tomorrow or early in the week about getting a couple of head shots and maybe one full body shot.
