MegaCon 5005 Convention & IconFilmStudio!

Megacon has got to be the biggest convention I have been to. The place where it was held, The Orange County Civic Center in Orlando was huge. Many people had said to me it was big and it lived up to its reputation. Myself and film partner, Simon Lynx got to the civic center about 12:30pm on Friday, February 25th, 2005. Soon as we parked the car, we started to unload and find out where we had to go. We walked around for a few minutes, going upstairs then back downstairs to finally find The Con of Mega! It was in a gigantic room, of course. With numbers hanging from the top to make it very easy to find our booth number. Once we arrived to our final destination, we were welcomed by Andy Lalino of Metropol Productions and director of the short horror film Filthy and Greg Rivera of Relic Films who shot the short film The Uninvited. Also there giving Andy a hand was special effects and make-up artist, Brian Angeloff (Brian worked on make-up for the two POP scenes and did the F/X for Filthy.) We were still waiting for our other friend Jason Liquori of Hocus Focus Productions. He was coming with actress scream queen Debbie Rochon who was the hostess of Jason's Lunar Pack series. We come to find out that the fifth member of the group, Rick Danford was not going to be able to make it due to work. So, it was the four of us groups which gave us a little bit more room on the tables. I don't even know if we would have room for a fifth group. We lucked out. A few minutes past and Jason and Debbie arrived at the scene. Miss Rochon has starred in hundreds of films in the last ten years. She was also in another film called Bleed. I told her about our movie Bleed, and she asked if it was better. I laughed and gave her a copy of the film. Debbie said we should sell them together as a Bleeding Box Set.

The first couple hours went by and it was very slow. We only made one sale I think in the first few hours. Friday wasn't a very busy day for the convention, but things would pick up the next day, which I'll talk about later. The two DVDs that we were selling were, Bleed and Chameleon. Both discs had tons of extras, such as short films and trailers. The other booths were selling anything from comic books to Star Wars figures. The booth next to us was none other than Troma Entertainment. For those of you who don't know who Troma is, they are famous for making the cult classic The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuk'em High. In the 90's they made a bunch of films such as Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. and Tromeo and Juliet which starred Debbie Rochon. To may surprise, Lloyd Kaufman, who is founder, president, writer, producer, director, etc. to Troma Films was there. I've been a fan of his work for so many years I was thrilled to meet him. Jason introduced myself and Simon to Lloyd. It was an honor to meet him. We gave him a copy of our DVDs. The cool thing was he wanted us to autograph them. He was one of the nicest persons I ever met. He even said he would be in one of our films for free. He's also going to be in one of Jason's films as well. You may be seeing a cameo of Mr. Kaufman in an ICON film in the near future.

Half way into the day, Simon and I decided to walk around the convention. We saw a variety of sci-fi characters. Stormtroopers, Boba Fett, Super Mario Bros., Spider Man, Thor, X-Men, G.I. Joes, characters from all kinds of anime. The best were one guy who was Shaun from Shaun of The Dead, he walked around the convention posing for pictures with everyone. Another funny one was a guy dressed as Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, but the shape this guy was in, a cordoning to Simon it was more like he didn't Escape from the Refrigerator. We saw some more cool things as we wandered around. Then we walked over to where all the celebrities were. Looking around to see who was there, I saw Lou Ferrigno, The Hulk himself. I shouted to Simon, "There's Lou Ferrigno!" Simon was very surprised as well. We didn't know he was going to be here. We walked over to his table, the guy still is in great shape. Simon asked if we could get a picture with him and an autograph. He said sure if you buy one of his books or color pictures. We did but it was worth it. If we bought the book we got a b/w picture anyway. I was shaking giving the money to him. I can't believe I was meeting The Hulk. He signed the picture and the book and we got that picture with him. He was a cool guy. Also there was the cast of Buck Rogers. We didn't even recognize Gil Gerard. He needs to go back to the 25th century cause the 21st century hasn't been kind to him. Also there were Felix Silla who played Twiki, Erin Gray who you might know from the 80's sitcom Sliver Spoons, she played Wilma on the Buck Rogers series. And also Thom Christopher who played Hawk in the last years of the show. Other actors that we saw were Sam Jones and Melody Anderson from the 1980 film Flash Gordon and Richard Hatch who played Captain Apollo from the original Battlestar Galactica.

Later in the day, I finally got to met Katherine Leis, who is from the Orlando area and is an actress, writer, filmmaker. We've exchanged e-mails over the last year but never met in person. She wrote a great review on our film To Live Is To Die when it played at Saints and Sinners IV. Her film, Run played at that same festival and was playing at Megacon. We talked for a bit about different movie projects we worked on or that we want to work on. We also talked about working together on something in the near future. She was very wonderful and is very talented and it was nice to finally meet her. We also met for the first time, actress, model, writer, filmmaker, XZanthia. We have seen her in Other Side Cinema's Homeland Security and is featured in the up coming sci-fi film Unearthed. We talked with her and she was very nice. We talked a little about the films that she done and people she worked with. After that the convention shut down for the first day and Simon and I checked into are motel room and got some rest for the next day.

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