Animethon

Animethon - Conducting Orbis Orchestra & Judging Take The Stage

Last weekend was a day filled with fun and excitement at the 23rd Animethon convention in Edmonton, AB Canada. From Thursday to Sunday, I attended the convention with the awesome staffs, media, and industry personnel.

Saturday was the Take The Stage talent show preliminaries that I was judging in and Sunday was the big day where Orbis Orchestra returned to Animethon to perform backed by popular demand.

The Orbis concert was met with the same amount of excitement and hype that you would expect from the amazing attendees of Animethon. It was surreal to enter as an orchestra and have people cheering and screaming throughout the show and to be treated almost like rock stars. We featured our last year's awesome guests Vicky and Rochelle to sing with us, and the addition of having cosplayers on stage and being able to take a group photo with a number of our lovely audience, made this concert certainly one to remember.

After the orchestra concert was a tight panel schedule half an hour later which was judging the Take The Stage Talent Show finals. All the contestants this year gave a strong effort in performance full of surprises, energy. Congrats to all the contestants as well as the winners! Hope to see everyone next year!

Take The Stage Finalists

Edmonton Concept Pop Orchestra First Concert

The Edmonton Concept Pop Orchestra (temporary name) has made its debut performance  (as well as my debut performance in conducting) at Animethon, Edmonton's annual anime convention. The performance was absolutely breathtaking, we had a turnout of hundreds of the most loud, hyped, excited, and passionate audience the members of the orchestra, including myself has had the pleasure of performing for. Thank you Animethon for having us!

This orchestra has been a dream of mine to put together, though I never found the right reason to start it, so when Vicky Lau from Animethon proposed the idea to me, I immediately took it up. It  took us 4 months in total to put together our members and rehearse. All the music was arranged and orchestrated by our guitarist Geoff Li and myself from scratch. Our sets included video game and anime music such as Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Cowboy Bebop, Legend of Zelda,  Sailor Moon, RWBY, and none other than the extraordinary work of Joe Hisaishi from the Studio Ghibli movies. Our orchestra members worked extremely hard for this show, and we all agreed all the hard work has certainly paid off. Stay tuned for more news from the orchestra!

PS. Video of the concert will be coming soon!