OWTF z3144228 you were there?! Judging by that angle, I might have spoken to you..
These past 2 days have been crazy, to say the least. It started on Tuesday, where the girls arrived from Japan. We were stalking their blogs to see what time they were gonna be here. It was harder than usual, flights from both Narita and Nagoya were possible, and we didn't have any inside info on their arrivals. So the only solution was waiting. There was a group from SGP48 who were going to be there, and I was stuck at work, so I did everything I can to help them figure out which one it was. In the end, they arrived at 5pm from Narita. This sorta disappointed me, I had expected them to arrive at 11pm.
Then came the announcement on the facebook page. The concert the next day was to be a birthday celebration for one of the KII girls, Yamada Reika. To give you an idea, we had notification for Nacchan's birthday show more than a week before, which was plenty of time to prepare. Even a day ahead would have been great, but the night before is pretty impossible to pull off. But fuck it man, I wasn't gonna let it be a birthday show without even coordinated lightsticks. I asked around and managed to get some contributions for the lightsticks (to give out) and had instructions printed for all the attendees of the show. I enlisted the help of one of the local Japanese fans, who took some time to help us modify the Nacchan flyer for use with this show. All this time, we still had no idea if it was possible to obtain the amount of lightsticks we needed.
Wednesday came. Woke up bright and early, and went to the lightstick place with kevinamadeus (from sub48; he flew down for the show) and managed to source out 200 lightsticks. The place is for 500 people, so having only 200 kinda sucked. But I couldn't get much more and have it be in time, not to mention having to drop like 100 dollars on it before I could collect money from the rest of the guys. I was in a dilemma, there was a cafe event which happened from 1230-1400, and I could only collect after that. But we also had wind of a walkabout (similar to what happened with AKB) happening, and I didn't really want to miss it. But I was willing to sacrifice it if I really needed to, I couldn't ask someone else to do it. The good news was that I didn't need to sacrifice it. But that's because it happened during the cafe event orz. We even saw them walking out from the cafe. Too bad I suppose. But at least the cafe event was decent (the food wasn't, though).
We went to collect the lightsticks, and soon it was go time. We got some time to talk to the officials, and we got permission to distribute lightsticks when everyone was entering the venue. We also got the last block of tickets to go in, so we were going last anyway. Surprisingly, there were a lot of people who already had yellow lightsticks, so the lightsticks lasted all the way till our block, which means a majority of people had yellow lightsticks to use. Some of the Japanese were a little surprised to receive free lightsticks, so we had to do some explaining about the show. The fliers we printed were a lot of help too.
The concert itself was expectedly awesome. They did Ame no Pianist and Wimbledon! Fuck yeah! I don't know why they pulled out AKB48 songs too, but I guess it was easiest since everyone knows Aitakatta and whatnot. I couldn't really see shit, because the people in front were kinda tall, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I had to ask kevin a bit of stuff, cuz I didn't recognize some of them. The MCs were a lot better than AKB ones, because they actually had gags to do and whatnot. I think it really highlights the difference between SKE and AKB. The translator was there, but had no work because things were moving too fast for a translation to be any good, haha. I hope AKB would improve on their MCs too, it would be fun to see the girls in a more natural environment, instead of stumbling through English and whatnot. That said, Sato Mieko has really fucking good English.
The initial plan was for me to do the English announcement before the start of the concert, but the concert people wanted it to be a secret from Reika, so we kept it quiet. One of our guys was supposed to announce in Japanese, but we were told that an SKE fan had flown down and had been to many seitansai, so we gave him the honour of doing it. Just after the VTR (when the next AKB48 performance was announced) I went up to the front and did a short announcement in English. I also nearly said 'oh, and as you can see, there's some shit on it'. In front of 500 people. LOL. It was the longest encore call ever. It was so great seeing all yellow lightsticks waving in unison, chanting her name. The feeling is quite indescribable, to be honest.
They performed Pareo! And other stuff, and we sang a happy birthday to Reika. Then there was an announcement! There was going to be a handshake for the girls to thank all the fans, yay! Except the girls under 16 wouldn't be there due to labour laws. Fuck. That meant we couldn't even wish Reika a happy birthday. I was crushed. I hope she liked it, though, I know I didn't mind putting in the work. It's so great seeing a plan come together, and I think we did a pretty decent job, considering we had 24 hours.
Would like to thank everyone who was involved! We had a great international crowd this time, too bad I didn't get much time to talk to anyone (mostly cuz I don't really know all that much about SKE).
Topic: [Concert] AKB48/SKE48/NMB48/SDN48 concerts in Singapore (Read 58422 times)