This was the first movie panel that I have ever been to, and it was in London, in Leicester Square. I was fortunate enough to receive a ticket to this event after entering a draw on the MCM Comic Con website, due to this I assumed that the tickets were something that you couldn't buy and also that there wouldn't be many people attending. Upon arrival, 20 minutes before the doors were meant to open, this assumption on how many people were attending was drastically disputed, due to the massive queue curving around the street out of view of the cinema entrance. It was at this point that I was sure I wouldn't get in and should probably fore go the waiting around in a queue to be sent away, however I stuck with it and was soon making my way inside to the panel.
If I'm being honest I wasn't really sure what to expect from a Q&A panel, my only knowledge of them is from several videos I've seen on the internet and of peoples experiences at conventions and such. They seemed however to go all out with the event, in the lobby to the theater were people dressed up as soldiers from the movie, there were costumes on show to take pictures with and the place had been decorated in the theme of the film. As an added little touch when we arrived at our seats everyone got a free drink and some crisp things, probably because they knew that with all of the queuing and waiting around some of us had worked up a little appetite.
Enough with the background info of the event, not long after we had got settled in our seats we were greeted by our host for the evening who I'm guessing had done this plenty of times before, getting the crowd all hyped up for what was to come. Before the cast and crew members were to appear, we were shown as I've said, several several minute long clips of exclusive footage of the film. As I'd only seen one or two short trailers of the film up until this point these clips really enticed me into wanting to see the film, they also showed just how impressive the film looks and the scope and scale of the project.
Still prior to the actual Q&A portion of the event, the host was regularly telling us to take any photos we wanted, and to make sure we tweeted them out, put them on facebook and used certain hastags, etc... Later we'd find that many of the questions were ones that were being pulled from people asking on facebook and twitter.
When the cast and crew finally did emerge onto the stage it did take quite a while for people to settle down after all of cheering, and taking photos, which is good because it showed how much people wanted to be there to see them and hear about the film. I was lucky in another regard to this event, as I now had my new phone which meant that i could take pictures without the people looking like pixels. I still wasn't able to get amazing pictures as my camera doesn't zoom in all that well and there were often peoples heads in front of me, luckily though there was a big screen behind them which was recording them so the people at the back could see and so I was able to get decent photos from that, I'll add some at the bottom of this blog.
As i said I did have certain expectations going into this event, however the Q&A far exceeded what I had anticipated, it wasn't just a here's a question and here's an answer type of panel, they were answering the questions but often going off topic telling little anecdotes or stories from being on set and things like that, allowing us to hear more behind the scenes stuff and just more about the people behind the film. Basically it was more informal then I had anticipated and that made it so much better.
After everything that I experienced at this event though, it being my first of his kind, it is definitely awesome that I now get to say that I saw/kind of met Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley, an opportunity that I don't think I'll be getting again anytime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment