Anime Detour 2025 – Materials and Convention Thoughts

Hi all, Jessi here. Now that I’ve had a few days to recuperate from this year’s convention, I thought I’d do my (somewhat annual) reaction post.

Firstly, I’m sure some of you are here for panel materials 🙂 You can find the presentation and hand-out for Shiny New Anime below:

Hand Out
PowerPoint Presentation

Secondly, you may also be looking for the AMV contest results. I’ve posted them to several social media locations – the most easy of which for people to get to is likely the Reddit post I made on r/AMV. There is also a YouTube playlist that I’ve assembled (with a lot of help from my friend revolutionaryjo!) of the finalists who’ve uploaded their AMV entries there. You can find it linked below:

Anime Detour 2025 AMV Contest Finalists

For everything else, check out below!

Without bothering with too many details from the past year, I took on some extra challenges this year as I transitioned to head of Programming for the convention. I’ve been a member of Programming staff for many years (I’ve been a staffer for 20 years and in Programming for many/most of those) so it’s not that it was a completely unknown situation, but things are always different when you have to manage many moving parts (rather than being one of those many parts). There was a lot more pre-convention work that came along with it, including a lot of meetings, many emails, and many more communications with other departments, but it was a good experience and I got to know a lot more people because of it (for a relative introvert like me, being forced to make connections is good practice for me).

All of this was in addition to the work that I do running the convention AMV contest. Because of this, I took on someone as an assistant this year and that worked out really well for keeping things on track once submissions were in. This was good timing, because we had more competing entries than we’ve ever had in the past (I suspect that it had something to do with an animemusicvideos.org Discord server that I didn’t know existed until another of my staff happened to mention it to me when the entry form was about to be closed). Whatever the reason, the number of entries made it extra difficult to narrow down to our group of finalists, and that added a lot of extra challenge for our group of judges. Definitely the kind of problem that you want to have as a contest coordinator!

As usual, we were lucky to have Kris “Phade” McCormic as one of our invited guests, and we’re doubly-lucky that he’s almost become kind of an honorary member of the Programming department, so we got to glean some of his wisdom of things AMV and general video-related, which is always awesome.

Beyond that, the weekend went by really quickly. We arrived Wednesday evening to start setting some things up (most of my own set-up is Thursday-centric, but there were a few things to get rolling Wednesday). Wednesday was really the only time I was able to eat a real sit-down meal as well, so we took advantage of that time (and the fact that the convention population as a whole hadn’t arrived so we could get a seat, lol).

Thursday was when things really got going – getting equipment checked out, getting the panel rooms ready with some of our own equipment, laying down large drop cloths for our creative programming team (last year we did sticky plastic and that lasted about 3 seconds into the convention, so this year we invested in some reusable canvas and from the looks of it that worked way better). I liked that our logistics team dropped off stuff directly to our office this year (I appreciate the extra work that probably took). Many of my staff and other friends arrived on Thursday, so it was nice to see them in person (at least the ones I don’t typically see at the various meetings).

Friday afternoon – Sunday late afternoon is the meat of the convention, obviously. I spent the majority of the time generally being available as head of Programming as well as doing room counts and such. I also did some 18+ checks on Friday night (we had 3 areas of 18+ going at one time, so it was all hands on deck for Friday; Saturday was just one area so not quite as much of a challenge). I’m happy to note that there weren’t any major issues that I’m aware of, which is a relief. I don’t know what would constitute a “Programming emergency” and I don’t really want to find out.

Sunday evening was mostly packing things up (Programming showed up with 2 pallets and left with 2.5 due to some extra craft supplies we received as donations from another staff member prior to the convention. We all know that craft supplies just seem to multiply no matter what, lol). After that I could give a sigh of relief.

Below I’ll quickly run down some positives and challenges from the weekend, just to memorialize some things.

Positives:

• My Staff! – I knew it would be an extra challenge taking over as head of Programming this year, but it was made a lot easier by the fact that I have a lot of long-tenured staff and newer staff members who are great to work with. We got to bring karaoke back this year thanks to some attendees who stepped up as staff to take that piece over. It sounds like, from their perspective, things went great. I also had a friend who’d retired from staffing last year decide to come back, and I am so, so thankful for that. I do not have quite the aptitude with data analysis that they do, and it was invaluable to have them there. And that’s not meant to undersell the rest of staff, who all did their part to make things run smoothly.
• My old p.o.s. laptop – I brought this laptop to the convention on a whim because we have a new one that actually runs much better and this old one is more than a decade old (about 80 in laptop years). I’ve only really used it for conventions in the past so it’s in better shape than it might have otherwise been, but still way past its prime (it won’t take certain updates anymore and it can’t run Windows 11). Due to some technical issues with the original streaming method, this laptop managed to save the 48-hour AMV room by running the AMV playlists dutifully the remainder of the convention. Thank you, dear laptop!
• Guests – Because of how I’m involved I don’t usually have a ton of interaction with the convention’s invited guests. However, I happened to be putting out name cards for several of their panels on Friday and had some really nice interactions with them, however brief they might have been. An additional shout-out to our guests head who I worked with closely to ensure the guest schedule was finalized and in place prior to other event and panel scheduling this year. It made everything so much easier.
• Panels! – We had more panelist submissions than we’ve ever had previously, which allowed us to have a really full schedule in spite of the typical cancellations that we see normally. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on all weekend (I wish I’d had time to attend more of it, lol).
• AMVs! – Like I said above, we had an incredible bunch of AMVs this year, and I’m really proud of the show we were able to put together to show off the finalists.
• Accessibility – The convention had a more robust accessibility team this year, which I think is a great addition to the convention. I think there are still some things to work out, but overall I’m glad that this has become a focus over the last year.
• Artist Alley – This is always one of my favorite parts of any convention, but this year a few of the booths were holding a stamp rally for a fandom I’m a part of, and as one of the few outside activities that I participated in all weekend, it was such an awesome break. It really reinvigorated me. An extra +1 for the boba tea stand inside Artist Alley which physically reinvigorated me with caffeine, haha.
• Shiny New Anime – This is always a high point for me, since there are people I see at this panel that I don’t get to see or hear from at any other time of year. It also forces me to keep up on new anime in spite of my other busy life things (definitely having a young kid is pretty high up there as adding to the busy-ness of my life).

Challenges:

• Space allocations – There were definite issues this year with the amount of space we have available and the number of things we want to utilize the space for. Part of this is just unlucky – we had additional space initially but that fell through due to construction reasons, so had to compress events into more limited space. But I’m really hoping that we have some additional usable options next year. There’s so much more I’d love to have happen at the convention!
• Scheduling of Charity Auction – This is more specific, mostly because I feel kind of bad about it. The convention revived its charity auction last year, and this year I scheduled it for a similar amount of time in the schedule, which turned out to be not nearly enough time to get through the absolute massive number of donations that were received. This ended up resulting in a conflict with the event that was taking place in the next time period afterwards, which happened to be the AMV awards that I was personally running. I think it’s just one of those “lessons learned” (I’m actually planning to load up next year’s scheduling grid and block off the time for it as soon as I think of it, rather than waiting so that they can have the time they need next time). If it were anything else afterward I would have just let them go, but not only were people waiting to get their awards and see the AMVs again, I’d also scheduled myself for something else immediately after that so couldn’t hang around too late. Yeah, I still feel pretty dumpy about this one, but also I didn’t know it’d be so successful.
• 18+ Badging – Everyone wants 18+ programming (and even more of it than we currently schedule) but no one wants to check 18+ wristbands, lol. This has been a challenge from the absolute get-go, and it’s a problem that I don’t yet know how to solve. I don’t think getting rid of 18+ programming is really an option at this point – the cat is out of the bag. But hopefully I can find some way to get people to volunteer so I, an old lady who normally goes to bed at 9:30pm, doesn’t have to stay up until 2:00am dealing with it.
• My own scheduling – This is 100% on me, so I’m more writing this out as a reminder to myself, but I really overscheduled myself to begin with, and in addition to that I spent time working during times that I hadn’t scheduled myself at all. I need to make myself step away every once-in-a-while so I don’t burn myself out. I also need to learn to delegate work to other people, lol.

My major “discovery” this year is that Programming is hard work (which I knew) but when you’re the leader of the department you feel kind of bad telling anyone else to do some of that work, so you end up trapping yourself into doing it. It’s something I sort of laughed about earlier on in the cycle, and then when it got closer to the convention I wasn’t laughing anymore. I think many of us are poor delegators (when you have an obligation to something you want to see it through yourself and not burden other people with that responsibility) but the problem is that it’s work that’s not meant for one person to take on themselves.

At the time of this writing our wrap-up/feedback meeting is upcoming this weekend, so that will kind of put a cap on things for this year (and I might try to take a break from thinking about it for a couple of weeks to give my brain a reprieve). I might try to actually do more write ups and reviews of the many other anime series I watched and enjoyed in preparation for the year. But for now I think I’m just happy that things went well, that people had fun, and I got to see my friends over a nice weekend.