We interviewed Takehito Harada, full transcription will be available soon.

 Our newest staff member Alice Yan interviewed AX's musical Guest of Honor, Jyukai. Jyukai also left a special message for all their American fans, we will have that video as well as the interview transcription up later this week. 

The Masquerade was very short. Originally scheduled from 8PM to 12AM, all the skits from the Masquerade finished at 9:30. Regardless, t-ono.net was backstage taking pictures of each of the contestants.   

Lastly, Imagi Animation Studios at Anime Expo was playing a motage of their new Astro Boy movie set to release Fall 2009. 

Greetings from Anime Expo 2008! Starting oddly on Thursday this year, Friday had a decent attendee turnout. Definitely tomorrow (Saturday) it will be packed and we hope to bring you tons of photos of more cosplayers, and events. (Today we took around 500 photos.) 

We were able to attend Jyukai and Yoko Ishida's joint concert. At first, there appeared to be some mix up, but eventually we were notifed that press were allowed to take photos of the band. We'll have those up later after the convention. 

Quite a few panels we visited today including Dark Horse, Bandai, and ADV. In Bandai's corner, they pretty much listed each new title they would be releasing in the future with a short clip of each. (more details on that later) In ADV's case, mostly answered what happened to the company in their few months of withdrawl from the anime world.

For tomorrow, we've scheduled ourselves to visit David Hayter's (voice actor of the American version of Solid Snake from the video game series Metal Gear Solid) press panel. We will also be attending Shoko Nakagawa's concert, and will be bringing you pictures and video coverage if Anime Expo allows for it. 

We'll also be taking pictures of the Masquerade, again if allowed to do so by Anime Expo. The rules and regulations this year at Anime Expo have changed a bit and a lot of confusion has ensued especially for the industry and press.  

Regardless, don't forget we will have our one on one interview with character designer Takehito Harada tomorrow!

The staff is pretty much pooped, and we'll have a few full length reports ready in the next few days. 

If you haven't already guessed, yes we will be in fact covering Anime Expo 2008! Currently planned, we will be hitting various industry and press panels. We try to provide as much live updates as possible so for the fans at home can also enjoy the experience. Our associate at Anime Expo will be directing AXBackstage, so you might see us on cam if you look hard enough. We will also be bringing you a one on one interview with Nippon Ichi Software's character designer, Takehito Harada which has been currently rescheduled to Saturday due to his late flight arrival. Our camera crew will be walking around the convention filming various gathers, events, and panels; while our photography team has over 12GB worth of memory space for pictures on hand.

So stay tuned!

A quick update, NIS America has released character designer Takehito Harada's schedule at Anime Expo.

Autograph sessions (@ NISA booth, #311)
Thursday, July 3rd: 4pm - 5pm
Friday, July 4th: 10:30am - 11:30am & 4pm - 5pm
Saturday, July 5th: 10:30am - 11:30am & 4pm - 5pm
Sunday, July 6th: 10:30am - 11:30am

Full release after the jump.

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Read more: Takehito Harada @ AX08 Update