Descending into the Con. All images courtesy of Sarah Baisley and Rick DeMott, unless otherwise noted.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any bigger Comic-Con International 2005, July 14-17, 2005, the event drew a record 96,300 attendees and 7,700 exhibitors for a grand total of 104,000 individual people to San Diego. Attendees included not only fans of comics, sci-fi, fantasy and animation, but many entertainment industry types and press to the San Diego Convention Center.

The studios were again down there in full force, previewing movies, games, and animation amongst the comic publishers and collectors, as well as creative development execs looking for their next hit. No big deals were announced during or immediately after but undoubtedly many were spawned for future consumption.

This Comic-Con was even featured on a recent episode of the HBO series, Entourage, as the series stars did a mock appearance at the Con. Another growing event within the animation community for pitching and scouting talent are the parties given by animation talent agencies The Gotham Group and Natural Talent, as well as the annual Writers Guild Assoc. reception for its Animation Caucus.

The variety and numbers of participants dressed up as comic character seemed to have declined a bit and the San Diego Convention Center food services is still hopelessly inadequate at dealing with the vast numbers of junk-food munching zealots and booth workers who either can’t or won’t escape the center to refuel at the many fine nearby restaurants.

Producers, writers, animators, voice actors directors and network execs from Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. DreamWorks, Sci Fi and Disney/Jetix did presentations for returning and new shows, while Craig Miller’s now annual animation writing panel took a look at writing for gaming. For more details on what was presented, check out the AWN Comic-Con Flash Newsletter.

Writer/producer Mark Evanier, host of 14 panels, gave a great tribute to voice actor/radio personality host Gary Owens who amazed the audience with his incredible recall of names, facts figures and trivia. The man is a human encyclopedia and Google search, as well as a gracious and humble man.

Meanwhile, there were plenty of opportunities at Comic-Con to delve into the vfx and animation with filmmakers on a number of high profile features.

Director Bryan Singer touted the new Genesis camera used on Warner Bros.’ Superman Returns (opening June 30, 2006) while addressing IMAX and 3D possibilities. He suggested that the movie will look like “Rebecca in color,” but will also reference the original Richard Donner feature, the TV series and the Max Fleischer cartoons.

“We’ve discussed an IMAX version…as far as a 3D version, I have to see the demonstrations of how to do it that way…So for us to do a 3D version we would have to re-render other elements in the digital world, so we’ve not yet discussed the notion of rendering our visual effects in 3D.

“We are the first film to essentially use the Genesis camera, which was built from the ground up by Sony and Panavision to look more like film than any digital camera so far. And it’s quite fascinating and has created quite an image. It was spawned from when I did Brandon Routh’s screen test. I did it in both 35mm and 70mm and I looked at the 70mm resolution and I thought if there was only some way we could shoot this is in 70mm, but it’s not possible because of the cameras, the lenses, the rigs, so the Genesis camera offers something classic but new — and with the resolution that will blow up to IMAX.”