Covering New York Toy Fair 2017 - A Pixel Dan Vlog - Part 1

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: What's up Steena? Hi. Where are we? New York. New York baby. Why are we in New York? Toy fair. Toy fair. Is this your first toy fair? Yes. What? Not my first time in New York. Not your first time in New York but your first time in toy fair because she's going to be working the camera while I'm covering the show. This is my eighth toy fair. I actually can't believe that. Eight years. Eight years I've been covering it. But I thought it would be fun while we're hanging out here. Check this out. In New York City. We're chilling in Times Square right now. Whoa. I thought it would be fun to kind of vlog the experience. Right? We're going to capture the weekend. Kind of let you guys know what it's like to be at toy fair covering it from my standpoint so you can see what it's like. A little bit of behind the scenes stuff maybe. I don't know how this is going to go down yet. I just thought it would be fun to kind of film the whole experience and see what happens. What happens. So you guys are in for the ride right? Let's do it. Let's check out New York. Let's do toy fair. All right. Excited? Oh yeah. She's so excited. What do you got? Zoom zoom zoom blind box. Blind boxes. Impromptu blind bag madness. All right. Open it. We want to see toys. We want to see toys. This is riveting stuff right here. I want Sully or Mikey out of the six. I don't know what the other two are there. So what do we got in here? So what do we got in here? Let's see. You got Mike Wazowski, Sully. You got Dory, Nemo, Buzz, Woody, and two mysteries. Oh! What'd you get? I got a mystery. Oh! You got Wall. Is it Eve? No, it's Eve. Yeah, one of the mysteries. Yep. Oh, good job. So the other one must be Wall-E. Nice. Nice. Nice. I didn't even know these were a thing, but I found this at the Disney store. This is the Star Wars Legion. They're blind box stormtrooper helmets that just have crazy designs on them. Okay. Okay. Let's see what we got. Oh, look at this thing. Boom. Look at this. It's just crazy. Oh, look. It's got like the Rebel insignia over here. There's the Falcon. Han Solo's gun. It says Rebel on the top. The Death Star is over on the side. Those are kind of cool. These are pretty neat. So there's just all these little designs. It's like a little vinyl art toy, basically. How do you get it to focus on the toy and not you? Oh, is it focusing on me instead of the toy? Yeah. Click on the screen. God. Boom. That's much better. It's pretty sweet. So this is it, my friends. This right here, right behind me, is New York Toy Fair. This is the event. This is where I'm going to go spend entire days with appointments and talking to people and taking video footage and photos of new toys. And I love it. It's awesome. It's so much fun. You can see a lot of, there's a lot of hustle and bustle going on in here right now. It's quite busy. There's people everywhere. You can already see all the banners. There's Steena. But all the banners and everything for all the stuff that's being licensed and promoted here at the show. It's pretty cool. So I'm going to walk through. We're going to head inside. I'm going to get some work done, but I'm going to try to keep shooting stuff for the vlog as I go. Oh my God. It's the Power Rangers. Look. Ah! Yeah! Thanks, guys. Wow. Serious celebrity sightings here. So, the Hasbro events. This is something I want to talk about a little bit. A lot of people don't realize when we come to these shows that there's things that are in different places. And Hasbro is never actually here at the Javits Center with everything else. They have their own location near Times Square. And they have one appointment where they allow all the fan media to come and do their stuff. So, it's not something I can always just go to whenever I want to to take footage of. So, you know, anytime anybody's always messaging me or tweeting me or anything saying, Go back and get a shot of this. It's not something you can do. And it's kind of that way for Toy Fair as a whole because at Toy Fair you usually have to have appointments for everything. But when I'm talking about Hasbro, the thing that was kind of crazy about that is they changed things up this year. And when they sent everybody down to the show floor, they said, we have a new rule this year. Absolutely no interviews on the show floor. Which kind of eliminates a lot of what I do. You know, I usually do a lot of interviews. So, I had to change things up this year. I had to just go down there. I shot footage of the figures. And then I went back to the hotel. And I just kind of recorded my own dialogue talking about what I saw. You know, and it's not desirable. That's not exactly what I wanted. But one of the rules at a place like this is you have to play by the rules of the company. There's just no way around it. If they make the rules, you follow the rules. You do what they ask. It's professional. And it's not always going to work in your favor. Especially for somebody like me whose whole point of covering a show like this is to do videos on YouTube. And that I do interviews is kind of my thing. So, when I get told I can't do that, it does. It bummed me out. It really did. I was a little bummed. But I pushed through. I did what I could. And I still was able to put something together. I made some videos of it. So, just a lesson for you guys. You know, if you're ever in a position where you're doing something like this, you've got to play by the rules. Do what you can do. Make the best of your situation. And just be professional. So, this is the part of it. Part of the day where I actually feel like I work a little harder. And it's not actually... I guess harder is not the right word. But it's a little more monotonous. Because I spend all day long at the convention center. From the time I get there in the morning, which the show opens at 9 a.m. Until I leave in the late afternoon, early evening. Usually, a back-to-back appointments. Because that's the way it works. I usually go from one place to the other. You know, for example, like my back-to-back schedule. Usually overlapping in appointments. Because it's hard to stay on time. And other appointments run over. So, it makes your appointments run over. So, you know, I would run around from Funko to Super 7 to DC Collectibles to Diamond to Mezco. And like all of this would happen back-to-back. So, that's what I spend all day doing. Filming my interviews. Filming footage of the booths. You know, getting all of the shots that I need. Then, after I finally leave the Javits Center in the, you know, 4 o'clock realm, 5 o'clock realm. Depending on where my appointments end. I then, you know, take the train back to where my hotel is. Usually grab a bite to eat. And then I sit down and I transfer all my footage onto my computer. And I edit all night long. And then I have to sit here and I have to edit these videos. And, of course, this is where I run into the unforeseen issues. Which is always the worst. I mean, for example, this year, pretty much everything that I shot on day one, I had audio problems. And, of course, that's not something that I caught while we were filming. Because we didn't notice it. But there was something with the microphone cord that was making the audio cut out. So, I'm sitting here at night and I'm editing my NECA review. You know, and stuff like that. And I'm realizing that I have audio dropping out. And, obviously, there's nothing more frustrating than a hard day of footage like that getting ruined somehow. Now, luckily, the video is still pulled together okay. And you can still hear things. But those audio dropouts bother the crap out of me. I hate that. I hate that I had to do that. So, I sit here and I have to edit as much of this content as I can. And then I have to upload it. So, I'm like, I edit a video and then I try to upload it. And, of course, usually I'm dealing with hotel Wi-Fi and stuff too. So, that slows the process down. So, you know, for anybody that's ever wondered why my stuff isn't as fast, this is why. You know, people message me throughout the day while I'm at the convention center via Facebook or Twitter or email or whatever. And I usually, I just, to be perfectly honest, I don't check that stuff at the Javits because I just don't have time for it. But I will get back to the hotel and I'll flip on my phone and all of a sudden my Facebook messages are blown up and my Twitter is blown up and my emails are full of messages. And it's all people asking me why I haven't uploaded this video and when am I going to upload that video. And, you know, I think that's awesome that people are excited to see what I'm doing. But doing what I do, it just can't operate that fast. I don't edit from the Javits. I don't, I obviously can't upload my footage from the Javits. I spend all day focusing on filming and then I come back here to edit the video. So, what I do is a little bit different, obviously, because I do these interviews. I'm not the guy that's, I'm not really the go-to guy to get this information first. I'm just not. You know, there's plenty of websites out there like Toy News International and Action Figure Insider and so many of them. I could name drop them all because everybody deserves credit. You know, these guys have got the photo coverage and the news coverage down and they get it fast. And they've got great ways to just drop all their photos online as soon as possible. But I like to take my time with the videos. I shoot all the footage. I come back. I edit these interviews. And that way I give you my unique coverage of the event. So, just a little glimpse inside what it's like. You know, I'm sitting here working on, look. I'm sitting here working on videos right now. See my screen there? Look at all this. Ah, this is, that's what my editing program looks like. Sitting there just piling all this stuff in and I'm putting the videos together. So, I will be sitting here all night long until the wee hours of the morning, cranking out as many of these as I can. And it's not fast. Like, some of these interviews, like DC Collectibles with Jim is incredibly, like, that's not an easy edit. You know, I have to cut in a lot of footage. I'm cutting lots of pieces together. So, you know, some things are easier to edit than others. But I just wanted to give you guys a glimpse into what it's like from this side of things. To hopefully give you guys a better understanding of just what it takes to kind of put together one of these interview videos. So, now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get to work on editing these videos so you guys can watch them. So, now, I'll see you guys.