Project Akatsuki at Anime Los Angeles

This is Dana from Death Band, and I had decided months before-time that I would plan a skit for Anime Los Angeles 2009's masquerade. It was pretty sweet, lot of work, lot of time. We had a lot of complications during the time of making it. First off, we originally had thirteen people working on the skit, one could only help with preparations, another had bailed on us at the last minute, one of our members was really sick but went up on stage anyway. I gotta say, this was pretty hectic for me. Trying to finish up the basics of choreography alone was hard. We had to figure out what we were gonna do, and I entered into it with only an idea. We had come up with the idea of making a battle between, originally, two sides, until we got to the tech rehearsal, where we decided it would be a "you must fight to survive" kind of deal. It took a while, but we actually polished up the choreography on saturday when we had to show up to prepare for the masquerade. We practiced right on the spot in the green room. I had us all run through some stretches, do some practice, and of course, some more warming up. When we got up on stage, we ended just kind of loosely following what we had planned earlier from the start, and then we followed it more closely as we got to the middle and end. I think the skit only lasted for about a minute and a half, but I'm not sure.



Anime Los Angeles 2009 Masquerade

Skit Entry Number 21 - Shounen Beatdown

Presented by Project Akatsuki

Participants

- Aaron (Red Team's Scout)

- Ben (Hyuga Neji)

- Dana (Bando Mitsuru) (Music)

- Gonzalo (Ash Ketchum)

- Kazu (Mikura Kazuma)

- Koji (Minami Itsuki)

- Kurt (Choreography)

- Juan (Empoleon)

- Justin (Lelouch Lamperouge)

- Max (Choreography)

- Mike (Vizard Kurosaki Ichigo)

- Scotty (Uzumaki Naruto)

- Spenser (Choreography)

The High Quality version is available here. http://www.acparadise.com/ace/vid/4844

Points for originality and for getting the loudest cheers, but that's not good enough for the judges. The Combat Award instead went to a Tsubasa Chronicles cosplayer because they almost fell off the stage. Maybe next time, guys. It's too bad for us that the judges found us "derogatory to anime," even though our entire skit was centered around the violence found in shounen-derived anime, especially since all of our characters were from action series.

Before we got onstage, we also had a sort of photoshoot kind of deal that all of the masquerade participants were allowed to enter. All of our pictures are available here, among many of the other people with skits. http://imagecraft.smugmug.com/gallery/7026550_EkyXa#449930978_Xhr3M