By now the world already knows what a huge dumpster fire Anime Nation Fest Los Angels 4.19.24 – 4.21.24 was. I shared a table with my friend @san.doodling. We were happy with our turn out at ALA and was excited to look for more local conventions which was when we stumbled on ANF. The website was looking rough but by then @san.doodling had already paid the fee for a corner booth and we were locked in.
As we pulled up to the LA Convention Center, there was no visible signage to direct us or even tell people that there was an event going on today. Luckily we asked around and found the loading doc to offload our things. The event took place in one of the corner halls that was hidden away in the convention center. The first issue was that we did not have any corner room in our corner space. The other side of our corner was blocked off by a rail which defeated the purpose of a corner booth. The first day was a Friday, it was slow and we expected it to be due to people having to go to work or school.
On Saturday it did not get much better. We saw maybe 10 people lining up at the entrance waiting to get in, which was a terrible sign for the rest of the day. It was evident by the turn out and set up that this event really lacked advertisement and publicity. No one knew there was an even happening at the convention center this weekend. Towards the end of Saturday night some artists began to express that they have yet to make back booth or sell anything at all and many more joined in agreeing. There were some that voiced they were lied to about attendance numbers. The ANF team, Mega Show claimed that they expected a turn out of 30k over the weekend. Anything over 1k is generous for the audience turnout we saw. There were also concerns of:
- Blood born pathogens due to the tattoo being in the same hall as the Anime convention (we had no idea we thought it would be seprate since it was happening in the LA Convention Center)
- The choice of entertainment – booking a burlesque show when there were children running around.
- Smoking weed inside the convention center. My friend and I expressed that we had headaches throughout the weekend due to the fact that we are not smokers and have underlying lung related health conditions.
- The lack of security – No one checked our id when we claimed our table and there were no metal detectors to screen people.
- The lack of staff – no one from the host company Mega Show was physically present at the convention. 3rd party staff was hired.
Some people decided to cut their loss on Saturday and leave early. We tried our best to stick it out on Sunday because we were fairly local and wanted to make as close to our booth fee as possible. We did however end up leaving early all 3 days because by the last hour the convention was dead and we were tired.
Overall it was a pretty big loss for us. We luckily were able to make back our booth fee. But that did not cover the price for parking, gas, and food. Despite the chaos we made some amazing artist friends! <3
Images of set up:
