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Collectormania 4 by Matt/Morgoth (Admin of Chamber of Secrets Forums)
Friday
Ah, the bright and sunny English day that was Friday 3rd October 2003. I will admit, my day started off rather nervously. I hadn't ever driven to Milton Keynes before. Come to think of it, in my brand new car, I had not driven any more than twenty miles from my home. A lot could go wrong and I prepared for every eventual problem from breakdown to my emergency bladder control plan, but that's not really something you need to read about... Onto the more important stuff. As a newbie to Collectormania, I really didn't know what to expect. My initial thoughts about the event was that it was going to be a rather busy event and possibly not that interesting after about ten minutes, but I'm someone that has a glass half-empty, so it's nice when something comes along and fills it up and sweet zombie Sirius, I've never had such a great time.
So Friday comes and goes. I pick up Jamie from the train station and we go back to the hotel and set things up for the next day. Okay, well we don't actually set anything up aside from the DVD player and copious amounts of Buffy (season six), then we just head for our beds and wait for the next day to come, which it does and I remember telling Jamie, "cherish every moment," because as you all know, the best events, concerts, moments in life go by too quickly and I wanted us both to get as much out of the two days as possible.
Saturday.
Firstly, I don't like getting up at 7am on a Saturday. Why oh why must I endure the pain of such an early morning wake up call? So it's with great regret that I leave my almost comfortable bed and head out with Jammers (Jamie) to the shopping centre where this prestigious event is being held. Now, the good thing about holding it in a shopping centre is that you are not too far away from coffee bars, fast food outlets and department stores, so in the event you need a change of pace, you can happily stroll around, oblivious to the fact that international superstars are sat around in this big foyer area signing autographs for the many, many geeks and nerds like Jamie & myself and what a day indeed for all geeks & nerds the world over. It should have been called Geek & Nerd Pride. We could have had a parade, lots of colorful balloons and dancing monkeys... but ah, I digress.
We got to the Centre:MK at about 8am and entered quite easily through the supposedly sealed doors and made our way around the area until we eventually met up with Jason, the event organizer. Now Jamie had been telling me for days that we were getting our own stall and VIP passes and me being Mr Glass Half-Empty guy, didn't take that too seriously, being that you get promised many things in show business and you usually end up getting scraps, so I didn't want to get too excited. But, to my amazement and obvious excitement, we got the passes and what's even more amazing is I got a VIP GUEST Pass and Jamie just got VIP. I'm not sure how that worked out, but I'm pretty sure only the celebrity guests like Daniel Logan (young Boba Fett in Star Wars II) had those types of passes. Wait, my ego isn't that big!!!
So we find our area to put the MuggleNet banner up (and for about five minutes it stayed up) and to our amazement, the stall was right next to the signing areas for Elijah Wood & Dominic Monaghan! The first thing I said to Jamie was that we had to be back early on Sunday to get some good pics of these guys! Anyway, back to the story of the MuggleNet banner (hey, I didn't say it was interesting!). It all started when we realised that the banner was too long for the support units we'd been given and me not being that scientific had a very hard job trying to arrange the banner in a way that looked good or for that matter stayed up! So, I decided to do what only a manager could do. I delegated Dilbert style and let the chump (Jamie) do it and he did a mighty fine job and got the banner to stay up..... on the table. Still, we knew that MuggleNet would get some good publicity being so close to Elijah & Dominic's signing areas, so we decided that the banner saga was done and we needed to go hunting for autographs.
The crowds gathered very early on where the Harry Potter guys were signing autographs, not forgetting the huge numbers of men lined up for Kristanna Loken (Terminatrix from Terminator 3). Jamie & myself were initially wary about how to proceed with our day. Jamie and I had no idea what we should do first: get autographs? Shoot footage for the site? Have breakfast? We ended up wandering around for a fair few hours until we decided to pay money and get the Phelps Twins autographs and pictures. It was at that point that we realised we could go behind where these guys were sat and just hang out for a while, which we did and at that stage, Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom) had shown up and was sat with Daniel Logan and the Phelps Twins, with Jamie & me behind taking pictures and filming the action from the actors perspective. We ended up having a very nice chat with Daniel Logan (Bobafett out of Star Wars) who turned out to be a really nice guy.
While filming and getting our photographs, we heard that the Harry Potter talk for the evening still had tickets available, so we agreed to leave the Centre:MK earlier than expected in order to rest up for a while before heading back out in the evening for a fine fun chat with these guys. So after a brief stop at the hotel, it was onto the Odeon Cinema where several screens had been reserved for Harry, LOTR & other discussions.
Let me just say off the top, that Christian Coulson is easily one of the nicest, best and most well spoken public speakers I've ever come across. He led the talk very well and was able to direct questions in a proper manner, including some dreadful questions from one gentleman who had decided to ask amongst other things questions about chicken bones and who Matthew Lewis thought was going to die in book six, revealing to Matthew who died in Book Five even though the lad hadn't finished the book yet! Still, the talk progressed in a good manner, with some very good and bad questions from people and some good answers from the guys. We weren't allowed to videotape the event for contractual reasons (bizarre if you ask me, which you haven't). Nothing was revealed about the new film, other than filming was in the post-production phase or the wrapping up phase. Something technical.
So, the chat finished, Jamie & my tired self got a bargain bucket from KFC and headed back to the hotel where we ate and crashed out for the night, awaiting the big arrival of You-Know-Who on Sunday. No, not that You-Know-Who, I meant Elijah Wood!
Sunday
Firstly, I don't like getting up at 6.45am on a Sunday. Why oh why must I endure the pain of such an early morning wake up call? So, I gets up out of my oh-so-hard bed and proceed towards a day of what I imagined was going to be incredibly busy. If Saturday had been a record day for visitors, then Sunday was going to break that record and multiply it by a hundred. Also, at this time of morning I wasn't entirely aware of just how tired I really was.
So Jamie & I get to the centre at about 7.50am and the queues were already forming outside. We needed to set the banner up, so we went inside and proceeded to set it up in the same place as we did the day before. We then relaxed a little until the crowds started gathering for Elijah Wood. So anyway, I went off to find McDonalds and get breakfast leaving Jamie to man the fort and in the meantime the doors had indeed opened as I thought they would have and the crowds quickly descended onto the Elijah queue. Jamie phoned me on my cell phone and suggested I get back to the line up now, which I did and I was blown away. At 9am, the queue was stretching outside the venue and the people issuing tickets to see Elijah were already struggling to keep up with the demand. Jamie & me looked on and began to theorise just where Elijah & Dom would enter from and we roughly guessed right when just after ten, two smallish guys in trendy clothes walked passed us with a security escort and all the girls started screaming wildly.
At this point, all those people that had acquired tickets began to rush down to the signing area hoping to be first in.
It was at this point that Jamie & myself saw that the Collectormania Staff were not having much luck in controlling the swelled out crowd, some of whom didn't have tickets, some of whom were complaining about not having tickets and some of whom were crying. We volunteered to help out with crowd control, me sorting out Elijah's queue and Jamie sorting out Dominic's queue. Now the first thing about crowd control work is that it is not easy. I was offered money to let people by, which I didn't accept. I was verbally abused by people, threatened and generally had a tough deal. People were upset that they'd driven for long hours and got nothing to show for it and as much as I sympathized with their dilemma, I could not do anything about it. If we broke the rules for one person, we would have to had broken the rules for everyone and of course that produced some ugly scenes.
I became concerned about Jamie's day and suggested to him that he leave Dom's queue and do something else. It wasn't really fair for him to be doing this when he had much more interesting things to do, so Jamie went off and did his Harry Potter thing, meeting and chatting with the Phelps Twins, Matthew Lewis and Christian Coulson, whilst I met up with some people whom I knew, one of which had driven down from North Yorkshire and couldn't get a ticket for Elijah, so I gave her my ticket out of the kindness of my heart!
So my day was spent doing the Elijah crowd control routine until about 4.30pm, when I went off with Jamie and a couple of others to see some HP cast members and talk to them, going backstage and having a good round up for the days events. At about 5.30pm, I drove Jamie back to the train station. By this point I was absolutely exhausted and not looking forward to the journey home, but I needed to get there as quickly as possible, because the weekend was catching up with me.
CONCLUSION:
Collectormania was a great, great event. As a newbie to it, I was rarely without something to do or someone to see and having the VIP passes made the event that little more interesting. To meet some of the most well known actors and actresses in the world today and do something for MuggleNet was truly amazing. The organizers of Collectormania put on a great show and were very hospitable and helpful to us, in particular event organizer Jason, whom we owe a huge "thank you" to for making our time there as good as it could of been. All that can be said now is ROLL ON COLLECTORMANIA 5!
 
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