LLNN Coverage of Anime Central 2003

Panels! Panels! Panels! More panels than you can shake a stick at and then some! Anime Central 2003 offered a huge variety of panels galore featuring many esteemed Guests of Honor, noted fans, and industry representatives from the domestic anime kingdoms all heading healthy discussions on various exciting anime and manga-related topics ranging from new shows, fan activities, industry follow-ups, historical perspectives, and other forms of fan entertainment lasting all throughout the day. Packed full of attendees, every single panel or activity offered something to learn from. If only school or work meetings were this stimulating.

Anime Central 2003
Panels and Discussions 1


Drawing Advice: Character Designers Hiroaki Gohda and Hidenori Matsubara lent fans their professional advice on drawing up designs for animation works. Topics included female cleavage, clothing folds, shading, textures, artist styles, lines vs. detail vs. time to produce, and the ongoing quality of animation.	Live Action Acting vs. Voice Acting: American Guests Richard Cox, Laura Bailey, Richard Cox, Monica Rial, Brett Weaver, and Tiffany Grant all gave helpful insight into the vast world of voice acting. Featured subjects included experience on stage and television, artistic processes, taking care of one's voice, and versatility of acting styles on such shows like Saint Seiya, Evangelion, Slayers, and many more.

ParaPara Beginner's Panel: Not just flailing your arms around will get you respect! You have to do it the proper way and fans at this panel taught audience members how to Parapara from square one. From the basics to getting down with the rhythm and beat of the music, fans were well on their way towards yet another weekend hobby addiction.	Japanese Language Basics: Linguistics representative was on hand to teach attendees on the basics of the Japanese language and how to apply it towards watching anime and reading manga. Topics included use of phonetics, syllables, sound effects, formal vs. romanic, grammatical and vowel comparisons with French and Spanish western styles.

Anime Music Video Production Workshop: AMV creators led a detailed panel on the explosion of AMVs across the United States and how one can get on board quickly and walk the righteous path of AMV goodness. Topics included extensive range of digital filters, mastering the pixels, staying away from DIVX, knowledge of the various codecs, using MPEG2 compression algorithms, editing in 100% uncompressed AVI format for best possible accuracy of video and audio track sync-up, judging picture quality, and choosing the right theme for AMV competitions.