Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

Those of you with long memories may recall that I did posts for Amelia Con in 2014 & 2016. After that, the organizers of that convention decided there was not really the support in the area to go up against other local events. They moved the second instantiation from September to February, got a bigger space, and applied a lot of lessons learned, and I found the second Amelia Con noticably better than the first. However it was apparently not viable enough to do again, and there was never a third.

Amelia Coastal Con is a new show, and as far as I know, has no connection to Amelia Con. However, it was held in the same venue, the town recreation center, where Amelia Con started. As you may know, I require very little urging to go to Florida in February.

I found the show to be smaller than even the initial Amelia Con, a bit less organized (not surprising for a first year), and focused much more on Anime than comics Comics were already not a large part of Amelia Con, but there was no comic content or merchandise at Amelia Coastal Con. That's fine, people are interested in different things. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, there was an old school Trek presence with Neutral Zone Studios, perhaps because they are basically local, having a fully fledged Star Trek filming venue in nearby Kingsland Georgia.

The main space of the Recreation Center was occupied by vendors and gaming tables while the Stage was curtained off and used for presentations. There were also vendors and exhibitions on the ball field behind the center, and food trucks in the parking lot.

New since my last visit (to the Recreation Center, not the town) was a marsh trail, a small bit of which I walked, and which was very nice in February. How it would be in July is yet to be seen.

I bought a few figurines, saw a presentation on cosplay and a Star Trek fan film from Neutral Zone Studios which was really quite good for a non-professional effort (see below), and watched the cosplay contest, which was largely kids this go-round.

Anway, it was a nice way to spend a winter weekend, and from their Facebook, it sounds like they are planning to do it again next year (though there are no details).

Well, I don't really need much of an excuse to visit Fernandina Beach, one of my favorite places, so when my sister noticed that there was an Amelia Island comics, steampunk, gaming and anime convention, , I decided to check it out.

Compared to the Charlotte Heroes Convention, Ameliacon was quite small. There was one exhibit hall, in the park on Atlantic Avenue which houses the municipal swimming pool, with gaming and presentation events in the town womens' center behind the park. It seemed to me also that the convention focus was definitely more on gaming, costuming and cosplay than on comic books, though there were some authors and artists there.

I certainly felt out of the loop on some issues! Magna/Anime character design generally hurts my eyes, so I was pretty clueless about one of the properties that seemed to be a very big thing Attack on Titan. There were a number of costumers basing their characters on that. I was also completely in the dark about what is apparently a very popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale, something the contest winning cosplayers based their presentation on.

I missed the morning presentation on Steampunk, having somehow convinced myself that it was in the afternoon, but did catch an interesting presentation by Joshua Johnson on doing video special effects on, basically, zero budget.

The audio for the presentations was the most problematic facet of the convention. I got the impression from listening to one of the organizers talk during the costume contest that someone had promised the convention a PA system and then left them totally in the lurch. I could follow ok during the effects presentaion, and parts of the Marvel/DC artist's presentation, but I gave up during the Homestruck panel where the panel were all using their indoor voices, and where I was only sitting in to try to figure out what Homestruck actually was anyway.

The costumers were out full force in the exhibit hall, and then at the closing costume/cosplay contest.

During the costume contest, it was announced that the convention would be shifting out of the fall and into February, so there will be no Ameliacon 2015. The next will be Ameliacon 2016 though they did announce a sequence of local get-togethers in advance of that. I certainly enjoyed myself -- I don't know that I would have driven that far for a convention of that size in a place I didn't have other motives to visit, but in the event, it was a nice trip.

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