From The Show Floor

Big, noisy, crowded, fun, exhausting. This about describes your New York Comic Con experience. This year I only had the weekend to attend, in years past I did the whole four days of mayhem, which meant  for me bigger crowds to deal with. This show is fast becoming the East's biggest "comic" show that is outgrowing the Javits Center which it is held at once a year. Of course most of the usual suspects where in attendance with some exceptions, DC Comics had no booth, and the large Marvel stage presence of years past was replaced by a small booth sans stage. No worries though, Archie, Image, Dark Horse and Boom! Studios who acquired Archania Entertainment this year all had big booths. The halls where filled with Supermen, Caps, Dr. Who's, Spidermen and Spider Women, Batmen, X-Men and everything in between. You can see some of them in the new gallery with this post. I hope to have some content for next years show, until then enjoy some of my coverage here.

XBOX 1

So today Microsoft treated us to the big unveil of its newest console in "gaming" XBOX 1. You can see I put gaming in quotes, for a reason. This unsexy looking black box was to be more of an all in one set top box that every company seems to want to make for the mass market these days. In the biggest black tent you can think of holding such an event, Microsofts core of XBOX development team strutted on stage looking more like they where ready for happy hour than unveiling their newest gaming console. Really, lose the jackets, and you with the suit and sneakers all you needed was a bow tie to complete the Pewee look. And not for nothing E3 is a few weeks away but could you actually show some real time game play? No real specs were revealed at the event, this was done later after the smoke and mirrors presentation. The only gaming that was shown was cut scenes of games in development. And where was your biggest franchise game? Oh wait here is a video of Steven Spielberg announcing a live action Halo tv series! Where is Halo 5????  No Halo any game it seems but we get  #Collarofduty Scratch that oh Call Of Duty Ghosts. It has a dog, is it playable? Or AI that you can tell it to rip an enemy's throat out? Any way they really wanted you to know it had a dog in it!  I miss the days when you popped in Halo, Gears of War, or Dead Space and actually played a game and nothing else!

Toys Toys Toys

It is that time of the year again and the Toys are coming to town. What will be the hot toy this year? Robots, fashion dolls, one wheel skateboards? Who knows but Pushing the Pixels will be there to cover this event so stay tuned for pics and video from the show floor!

You can be anyone for a day!

If I had to pick a theme for this past N.Y. Comic Con, this would be it: Be anyone for a day. Or anything for that matter, anything goes. In fact I think the Cosplayers outnumbered those who didn't dress up at the Con! Estimated attendance at 100,000+ that's a lot of costumes! But the most stunning event to me happened Sat at the south staircase to the lower level. Here there was a gathering that took over one side of the staircase by the windows. I've been to many cons but never seen this particular group before so I inquired what was going on. It turns out these folk where from a web comic that I never heard of called Homestuck! And boy were they organized, they drew attention of passers by with loud roars from time to time. You will know them by the candy colored horns and grey appearance most of them wore. Led by a guy dressed in black with blue markings, they organized into mythic groups and families from the series to take family pictures! Now this is the kind of devotion I would love fans to have of my work one day, this is for sure! But this goes to the main fun of shows like this, and that is that for a day you can be someone else, not worrying about your own struggles and losing yourself in the moment. That for a day you can be that superhero or Villain or movie star or even a droid. For a day you can be a kid again who dressed up as anyone on Halloween. For a day there can be magic, for a day you can be anyone!

Another X in the wall

I've used Final Cut Pro since 4 so when X came out with its new interface like many others I groaned and was lost just like them. No upgrade for me. It was version 0 and was missing many features from its previous incarnation. Well months later I figured that I test the waters and cut the stuff I shot at New York Comic Con on the trial version instead of iMovie, here we go. After two false starts I got the hang of this beast, I took all my source video from iPhone, NEX5N, and the Canon 60D and went to work. Rendering is done in the background while you're putting the movie together, individual clips can be worked on, video fixes, audio, color correction, stabilization all can be done in the background. Titles as well, using the included fonts or your own. Everything runs pretty fast, of course dependent on your hardware. After a couple of hours I had a finished video with titles and music. Over all not the bad experience I thought it would be. If you're into doing video and are in the Apple environment and are looking to step up from iMovie FCPX might mark the spot.

N. Y. Comic Con 2012

Wow. 4 days, and lots of gigs of photos and video to go through, no doubt becoming the East Coast version of the San Diego Comic Con very quickly! I had an awesome if not exhausting time but as with these shows , I could not see everything. And I only got to see a couple of friends in the business this time out . But for me the show was about coverage. Shooting, shooting, shooting. Rarely taking my hand from the shutter button, what a great event to shoot at! More soon.

Pre Con

This is the first post in my Comic Con coverage. Enjoy.