The first thing we did in San Deeg was head to the airport to pick up
Pardon the weird color washes. Part of this roll of film got exposed to sunlight. I'm surprised any of it's salvageable, actually.
When taking the trolley from National City, you have to transfer to a different line to get to the convention center stops. The transfer point is actually not far from the convention center itself—it's a bit of a walk, but not bad. I ended up just walking to and from the transfer station most of the time unless I was really tired, since it was quicker than waiting for a trolley. This shot is of a large sculpture thingamajig next to the center, as seen while walking from the transfer station.
Getting in on preview night was a breeze. It used to be that at the pre-registration line, you had to go to the booth for the first couple of letters of your last name, and they had to look up your name in little index cards. No more. The new pre-reg tickets have bar codes, and they just scanned it and let you through. No line whatsoever, even thought Preview Night was pretty packed. Pre-reg has always been the way to go (the on-site lines are insane), but now you're crazy if you don't pre-reg.
New Line had a big area to promote their upcoming movies. One of them was Guillermo Del Toro's new movie Pan's Labyrinth, which looks weird and potentially cool. However, most of the space was devoted to a film that everybody on teh Intarwebs should be familiar with by now:
I bet you that if SoaP hadn't become an Internet phenomenon, it wouldn't have even been mentioned at the New Line booth.
They really had a ball designing this booth. Not only did they have a big snake/airliner thingy, but they laso had put up "in case of snakes" safety instruction signs (and passed out a little handout with more), and if you walked into the snakeplane you could see actual props and costumes from the movie (the sign is a little blurry but says "Actual Wardrobe worn by Samuel L. Jackson"), and a video that included the SoaP trailer and music video.
The UDON booth. Sadly,
That booth was always crowded. I should've made time to get a sketch of Taskmaster (love their redesign for Deadpool/Agent X), but never got around to it.
The Hot Wheels booth had LIVE SCRATCHING! This was super sweet. On Preview Night they only had two guys and they weren't in costume (more on this later), but they were actually pretty good.
After the dealer floor closed up, John and I met up and tried to gather the rest, but it turned out they'd left earlier. So we went to the Gaslamp District and got some good (albeit pricey) Italian food. Nice seafood pasta. Back at the room there was horsing around and watching videos (far too many AMVs), and sleep sometime in the early morning.