Guest of Honor: Scott McNeil

San Japan is proud to announce our Guest of Honor this year, Scott McNeil. Easily one of the busiest voice actors in the world, millions of fans know him as the voice of Duo Maxwell from Gundam Wing and Gundam: Battle Assault 2 as well as Koga from the hit series Inuyasha. Scott has been in hundreds of shows and video games for the past 3 decades. Click here for more info about Scott.

Now an update from our Cosplay Director

(Please go to the original Facebook post if you’d like to reply)

Hey folks, I’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding how the Cosplay Contest is going to work this year, since SJ is also hosting WCS regional prelims.

1. WCS is a completely separate contest from our contest. Their staff is different, the way they run things is different, the objective is different. Any questions about WCS should be directed toward WCS personnel. There is a Facebook group specifically for SJ’s WCS prelims, if you’re interested I recommend you join that group.

2. Pre-judging has been completely overhauled for this year’s cosplay contest. We had a lot of complaints about how long we held you guys in Main Events before the contest - we did that so we could make absolutely certain everyone got pre-judged, but we hear you, 6 hours is a LONG time to sit in Main Events. Because of this, we’ve scheduled three two-hour blocks over the course of the weekend for pre-judging. Time slots are TBA, but there will be one on Friday evening, one on Saturday morning, and one on Saturday afternoon just after Cosplay sign-ups close. You’ll be able to come to any one of these pre-judging panels and get your costumes looked at by the judges - all of them will be there so we should be able to move through you guys at a pretty fast clip.

3. Lineup in Main Events most likely won’t start until an hour prior to the contest. Since we won’t be doing pre-judging, ALL of that time can be dedicated to walkthroughs of the space and every contestant will get the opportunity to walk the stage before the show. I’m also going to place a VERY obvious mark on the stage deck to show you where the best lighting will be.

World Cosplay Summit 2014 Qualifier Rules are now posted

Rules for the World Cosplay Summit 2014 Qualifiers have now been posted on the San Japan website. Submissions are open starting on June 10th and end on July 19th. Please over read them thoroughly as there are a lot to read before sending in your submission. The winner of the WCS Qualifier gets a free trip and hotel accommodations covered by San Japan for the 2014 US Finals in Spring 2014.