Crowd Management

As most visitors of SMC 2024 will acknowledge, the overwhelming amount of visitors on both days, but especially on Saturday has forced us to think about measures that will hopefully result in a smoother flow of several aspects of the show.

One of the measures we take to improve crowd control at SMC is to extend the opening hours of the show a bit, as well as the time we close the contest area for judging.

Keeping the contest area open during judging is impossible, as it’s simply too busy around the contest tables for the judges to perform their already difficult task.
In order to tackle that issue a little, we have decided that at SMC 2025 the contest area will close to the public at 15:30, instead of 15:00 on Saturday.

We also open the doors to the public half an hour earlier, both on Saturday and Sunday, meaning we open at 9:30 instead of 10:00.

Obviously there will me more to mention about this subject, but we’ll get back you on that later.

SMC 2024 is already history, but just saying it was successful is an understatement. It was a blast. We broke our own records again. The SMC record, that is. We also did a WME in 2022, as some of you may remember, but even those numbers come close except for number of contest entries.

The numbers:

• 89 volunteers were present over 4 days to make the show to a success.
• We had 2.772 models in the contest, by 708 artists, from 39 countries.
• There were a dazzling 172 vendors divided over 150 vendor stands.
• And most of all, we welcomed an unprecedented number of over 5.000 visitors

Although it is impossible to make everybody happy, the amount of smiling faces throughout the weekend, natural or stimulated by a surplus of adult beverages in the evenings, the atmosphere during the event, was heart-warming.

The teamwork during the show, but also during both days of building up the show on Thursday and Friday was better than ever, even with a good number of “first-timers”. Our club members and their helping partners surely made the difference.

And a special thank you for lending their helping hands goes out to the members of the British Flat Figure Society, Jan Willem Mol and Gaby Tysarzik.

The workshops on Friday, for the first time, were surely a success and that concept will be repeated next year. Stay tuned for more, as always, we have a lot of surprises up our sleeve.

We saw three awesome Best of Show awards for Ordnance, Fantasy and Historical Figures and for the first time a Best of Juniors “Arie van Kessel” Trophy.
Arie van Kessel,  a long-standing member of our club Scale Model Factory, and the driving force behind the Kids Club at SMC passed away in February 2024 and this trophy is in memory of him.

The contest results, a million photos of the contest entries by Eric Reits, the Best of Shows are published on this page.

That page also includes links to a random selection of video reports on SMC 2024 that we found on the internet. Thanks to all who found our event worthwhile and spent time registering it in moving and non-moving pictures.

Change in classes for Fantasy Figures in 2025

During the award ceremony we announced that we will introduce a new class in the fantasy figure painting category. In between standard and master’s classes there will be an intermediate class, we will call advanced.

As you may have noticed or experienced, the skill level in masters is changing so fast, and is at such a high level with many professional and full-time painters, that it is becoming increasingly difficult for pure hobbyists with limited time to paint to keep up and make the step from standard to masters, especially if they win a gold medal, which forces them move a level up.

In order to keep the motivation up we have decided to add this advanced level in the contest and you are free to register at that level as you see fit.

And now ?

The large number of visitors also imposes new challenges in crowd control and lay out of our floorplan. Both matters will be addressed by our team next year. Since we cannot increase the overall size of the show in terms of square meters, it will mean that there will be a significant change of the basic floorplan and set up if the show in 2025, but please rest assured that we will come with an even better experience for all next year.

SMC 2025 will be held on October 18 and 19, 2025, with some workshops on Friday 17th .
Be there and make the difference!

We have published the results of the SMC 2023 on the “History” page of this website.
Along with it, you can find an elaborate photo report by Eric Reits, a video report by Figurine TV and links to a selection of reports we found on You Tube.

We hope that you enjoy watching it and if you feel like it: we have similar pages for every edition of SMC since 2007.

Meanwhile, we hope to see you back at SMC in 2024. Save the dates:

“Men and Whale”
by Per Olav Lund – Best of Ordnance

“Goblins”
by Patrick Masson & Erik Swinson- Best of Fantasy Figures

“Ignacio Wills. Alpens – 1873”
by Juan C Avila Ribadas – Best of Historical Figures