Supanova and the return of Texas

So. Let's see how I go typing up a blog post with a bruised hand. Reverse snap is never kind to play, and more so if you happen to be a fine artist and you're playing aggressively against eight other people.

First, I want to apologise to everyone who's been regularly tuning in. I should have gotten this done earlier. The middle two weeks of June were the definition of madness for me, and I needed some time off to recover and rest. I may talk about a couple of those things later on, but that's really a blog post for another time.

Also, I tried typing up a post for Nova earlier, and it quickly turned into a play-by-play. Which is not incredibly interesting for everyone. I'll try my best not to dilly-dally.

OKAY. SUPANOVA EVERYONE.

I'd never been to a Supanova before. I'd done Main Animania twice before though, and basically assumed it would be the same, but a bit bigger and encapsulate a wider range of fandoms.

Now, let me tell you about what was right in that statement and what was insanely underestimated about that statement.

Have you been to Paddy's Markets before?

If you have, imagine what it would look like if you went to Paddy's and gave every fourth person a costume, and every second person a camera.

If you haven't been to Paddy's before, a music festival or any kind of crowd that after half an hour you feel over will suffice in the above situation.

Supanova had many many people. Too many people.

I guess that that part of my thinking considering that the first day I was at Nova, I was in the armour and therefore took up more physical space that a lot of other people didn't seem to think existed. Wait. That's a little confusing...

Brooke, how did the armour go in the long-awaited competition? Did you win?

Well.

The short answer is 'no'. The long answer goes something along the lines of 'I slept in and arrived after the prejudging check-in time closed'. Which goes to show that you should not try functioning on three hours of sleep and then expect that the next night you can get away with anything less than twelve hours sleep.

This was a little disappointing. I had planned everything for Supanova with the intent of entering Tex in the competition, and arrived late, dripping black ink everywhere and with my shoes already leaking.

That's something I didn't mention earlier. It rained pretty much all weekend at 'Nova, and I had to walk a kilometre from the place I was staying to the train station in the rain both ways.

And the ink I used to paint the armour, which I believe had 'waterproof' printed on the bottle, was not waterproof by any stretch of the imagination. I left little black puddles wherever I stopped on my way there and back.

But there were photos asked for. The first two were on the train, and those kind of mean a little more than photos taken at the convention. I mean, there's a much larger amount of people that go to conventions with their cameras, but the people on the train or wherever have no idea as per the occasion. They're just minding their own business, and you've popped into their world, oddly dressed and acting normal. They might not understand what you're doing, but they get to appreciate it nevertheless.

And let's not forget the rat-tailed 10-year-olds who waved to me and called me 'Master Chief' on the train. I waved back, because that's what you do when kids who understand at least part of what you're trying to be talk to you. I didn't have my helmet on, so there was no need to do the character business.

And thusly we arrived, soggy and putting black ink on everything, with one of my shoes already broken, at supanova. Don't assemble shoes with hot glue - you need stuff that bends.

The costume was well-received by everyone else, and I had a lot of people ask for photos. About 80% of those people kept calling me 'Master Chief' though. There was a great level of temptation to at one stage do the "My name is TEXAS" yell (Think that line from The Matrix) but, you know, my voice was kind of muffled by the helm, so there wouldn't have been much of a point. Would have fogged up the visor, and that would have been about it.

It was kind of cool that I had to actually tell people that I'd made the armour. There was black ink rubbing off here and there, so you could start to see green foam showing, but it was still rather cool that it was of high-enough workmanship to be mistaken at times for a store-bought Spartan.

There was a store-bought spartan there though - I saw a woman dressed in mjiolnir armour complete with battle damage and the correct shade of green. It was interesting seeing it up close, as I got to have a gander at the look and the feel of the licensed product. I didn't encounter her on the Saturday though, so we didn't get photos together.

Oh yeah, the photo business...

Let's go out on a limb here and I'll tell you what it means when you have a complete stranger ask you for your photo.

It means that your outfit impacted them enough to break the social convention of talking to a stranger, enough to ask to take a photographic record of your effort, alongside themselves, or taking a pose.

It is often a confirmation of the 'breaking down the fourth wall' business that I spent the last semester yabbering about, more so if they interact with you in a manner appropriate for your character.

I was only asked for one photo of me 'killing' someone else though. I put the lad in a headlock and then all was well again. But yeah. I got asked for a lot of photos. I'd be in the middle of having a conversation with someone, and someone else would tentatively approach me for a photo. I'd chuck on the helmet, pose, and get hit by five other requests. And then get about ten minutes to take the helm off for fresh air before the next photo.

So this was part of my Saturday. Something else that does happen with the photos is that social media lets a bunch of strangers put up photos that they've taken in a place where everyone else can see said photos too. So if your outfit's good enough, you might not need a camera for a convention - you just trawl facebook for the week after the convention and the photos that everyone else took of you show up.

I've done this before and been met with limited success. Considering that 1) I didn't have any pockets and 2) my point and shoot camera has vanished off the face of the planet, I was kind of relying on con photos for documentation of the suit and general reception.

Let me now post up the entirity of the photos I've found of Tex that were taken by other people.

Yep. That's all of them.

Oh, wait. I saved the best feedback for last.

Remember how I said 80% of people thought I was Master Chief?

This was kind of the highlight in terms of feedback I got from other people on Tex.

This tweet was sent by one of the guys manning the stall at 'Nova that sold Roosterteeth merch. Keep in mind that it's RT that created the Red vs Blue series. The guy at the stall recognised the character, and tweeted the photo he took to Kathleen Zuelch, the woman who voices Tex.

And the image was re-tweeted by the lady who voices Tex.

While there wasn't verbal feedback, getting a shout out from the voice actor of the character is about the coolest kind of feedback you can get.

The guy couldn't remember my Twitter handle, but it wasn't hard to find later on.

The rest of my day was spent taping the bits of armour back on, and being incredibly thankful for the hydration pack that I'd been able to borrow before heading out. I don't know how immediately obvious it is to the average joe, but a wetsuit gets pretty hot pretty quickly. Hydrate or get real dizzy real quickly. And yes, that happened.

What else would be worth mentioning about the day? There were many people, and many people I was trying to find that I now know because of conventions. I didn't find all of them, but also got pretty peopled out pretty quickly.

Oh. I bought a grifball!

It's a plushie tank mine.

The costumes were pretty incredible at Supanova, but I also think it was to a degree a wider range of the spectrum that I see at every other convention - there are always brilliant ones, and midrange ones, and ones that will get better in time. There were like fifty million Eleventh Doctors though.

Lots of TARDIS dresses, lots of Doctors. I get it, it's a cool outfit, and it's okay for you to love the series. But the only outfit I saw more than Matt Smith's Tweed-and-Fez was the Pikachu Onesie.

So many Pikachu onesies.

There should not be that many at a convention. My goodness gracious.

*shakes head, tries to not bump bruised finger*
I really hope this isn't broken. Silly paranoia.

OKAY, WHAT ELSE?

I stayed for the cosplay comp on Saturday, to see what the competition would have looked like.

It was pretty varied. Some were absolutely incredible. I would have been hard-pressed to match the best stuff, but not by much.
Next year, I guess. Animania is for anime; I can't enter Tex in the prejudging. Next year, with a gun and armour that doesn't fall apart or have ink pouring off it because of the ruddy weather. Or I'll just take the next planned thing.

It's probably my biggest problem with cosplay in general. I have this neverending list of things that I should be making at any given point in time. And the point in time when this list gets longer is usually when I'm in the middle to end stages of another costume.

So next year's big costume is probably going to have a shotgun that folds out into a scythe/sniper rifle combo.

Glutton for punishment.

Back to nova:
Sunday was a little more laid back. I took some edo-period clothing in and got to browse the stalls a little better. And remembered an umbrella. They make a big difference when you've got to walk a kilometre in the kind of rain that says 'I am not letting up, no matter how much you wish it'.

There was a stall for Weta workshop, which is better explained as the SFX group that made the costumes and paraphernalia for the Lord of the Rings movies, the Narnia movies, the Hobbit trilogy, King Kong, Avatar, District 9, and half a bajillion other things.

And when it was noticed that they had a panel that you could attend to see what they did and what they  were up to, I was like 'yes.'

And then I was like 'what does it take to get a job as a costume designer with Weta?'

And the guy at the stall was like 'send us a portfolio'

I think it would be equal parts exciting and freaky to get to work with Weta. On the one hand, it's a dream job for someone like me. On the other hand, they're based in NZ and I still get homesick if I don't go home at least once a term at the moment.

Mad industries that I want to work with, why you all outside of Australia?

Keep going, keep looking. Keep making.

So I guess that with looking at Supanova as a whole, I was a bit underwhelmed. Although I can kind of put those down to several factors:
The company I kept had me on edge the entire time
I'd not been ready for the kind of crowd
I took a huge cosplay while not being ready for the kind of crowd
Said cosplay had some major failures and I wasn't able to enter it in a competition I'd been winding up for the entire month prior
My shoes leaked on the Saturday and Sunday
I was overtired from finishing uni

Not sure if I'll go next year. I mean, I'm not ruling it out. I just wasn't prepared for what was going to be there.

Never underestimate how miserable wet feet can make you.

I guess these kind of feel like a little bit of a downer. There were some positives I guess. The tweet from Kathleen was one of those. Seeing an incredible amount of costumes was another. Weta was a third.

I had a lot of people ask about the armour, which was great. And I got to tell a few people about the blog too. Next time I should try for contact cards or something.

So yeah.

Next thing?

The Return of Texas

As mentioned earlier, the ink ran on the armour in the rain, which was a bit disappointing.
I also had some structural failures occur as well, some of which can be fixed, others of which I will just Improve so they don't break in the same way again.

Yesterday I took the armour out on the front lawn of my parents place and hosed as much of the ink that would come off as I could. And then wiped the helm down with a chux instead because it has batteries and lights inside it.

The idea at the moment with fixing the armour is to repair the foam that failed structurally, repaint the armour so it's uniform and won't get black everywhere when it gets wet, sew the velcro onto the wetsuit properly and fix up the vent holes and pretty much redo the entire shoe, because those suckers fell apart disappointingly fast.

And a gun. I want a gun. Although that is probably something I'll work on when I get back to Newie, since all said foam is in Newcastle and I'm not buying more unless I absolutely have to. There's three and a half full sheets in Newie. Enough to make half of the armour over again. At the moment I'm tossing up between building the assault rifle or the sniper rifle.

I think there's more things I can write on, but at the moment my decrease in typing speed is sufficiently getting to me. I'll leave you with the link for Weta's project list so you can see how cool they are,

a picture of Nathan Fillion holding a sniper rifle for no explainable reason

and the first trailer of the RWBY series, because it has my next planned big cosplayable character in it. It's a bit violent though, so do consider yourself warned.

My art is not like your art

I was supposed to be working on Directed Studies last week, and blogging like a regular person, and then realised I had three assessments with a combined weighting of 100% due in five days. And had not really done any work on them. So the armour had the brakes applied, to my chagrin, and then it was a week later.

I guess one of the more exciting things I can say about this week is that I should be able to start with the foam soon. Like, next week soon. I may have been aiming to have the whole thing finished as of last week but hey. Better to do a good job than to do a quick-and-sloppy. Especially with the materials I'm using.

Just saying. Cutting corners is all very well, but if you're paying a stack for materials regardless, you may as well do a proper job of it.

So I have the belt and the handplate to finish, and then all of the paper is done. It's an exciting prospect.

See the breastplate? That's more than 12 hours worth of cutting, folding and gluing. I didn't actually believe the guide when it said it'd take about 300 hours to make.

I take that back. I'm fast with the construction, but not incredibly so.

What can I say to get back on topic?

Ironfest was last weekend, but I wasn't able to go. No time and no money, and 70% worth of assignments that I wasn't ready for on Monday. It bucketed rain in Newie, and my housemate was out, so I kind of shut myself in and worked. Jim got to go though, and enjoyed it.

Fun fact?

Ironfest 2012, I went with three mates and we dressed as Weeping Angels. I blogged that visit, actually.

But the 2013 program leaflet-booklet-thing had us in it. It was essentially this picture, taken by someone else, so it was from a different angle.

So yeah.

This week. And last week.

Wait, was it the weekend before?

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

I had to try and explain Cosplay to my Directed Studies supervisor, and we stumbled across a few different things that make a Costume Designer in Fine Arts make a little more sense.

See, most of my classmates make the standard kind of art. Photos, sculptures, paintings and drawings. Things that you can hang in an art gallery and actually sell. And there's stacks more to it than that, but it's the basics. They make stuff and it's good stuff and it's quantifiable and looks good and sells.

And I make costumes by shredding old pairs of pants and sewing them together differently.

Pictured: Watt Space's Open Show project 2012

I worked a straight week on this

and barely slept

Result: finished thing. Got nowhere in the comp though.

It's been an odd peeve, but in spite of my being in Fine Arts, I've not ever felt like the typified 'artist'.

Maybe it's because my outlook on life is different. Maybe it's because I cannot draw as well, or make typical art as well.

A note to the artists reading: I am aware that the art world is trying to gravitate towards non-traditional art. I am also aware that it's usually traditionally-presented art that actually generates an income, and accolades and awards and attention.

But yeah. Cosplay.

Miranda asked me if the Halo armour I was making was original.

But that's the odd thing about cosplay. It's something that is original and not at the same time. The design is established by someone else, and the idea is established by someone else, but you still have to figure out how to make the flipping thing work.

And what usually happens is you end up checking out how everyone else did it as well, or if anyone else has done what you plan to do. You find out from others whether or not things worked for them, and how to make things kind of work for you too. And then you contribute to the circle of life and tell the internet how you did it too.

I don't think cosplay would have worked as well in the world before social media or the internet. Manga and Anime and video games all existed, but less people would have thought about replication to the Nth degree and then going to a convention where everyone else was doing the same thing and interested in the same thing and been super friendly with complete strangers.

But I digress. Cosplay is odd because it's original and it's not.

And it's my art form, but it's not like traditional art.

I wouldn't naturally hang it in a gallery, as it's not traditional art. But the equivalent would be taking it to a convention - it gets to be seen and interacted with a bunch of people who are interested in it.

Will I actually put in in a gallery?

I'm planning to in first semester next year. And have a bunch of cosplays wandering around in the gallery space. Just because my art is not like that of my cohorts doesn't mean they shouldn't get to see it.

I'd be nice to actually have people from Fine Arts get to see my stuff as opposed to just being the shut in that I am.

..

What else can I cover in this post?

There was the last week. And my art is not like your art. Um.

I get to try and explain everything that I'm doing to the rest of my class next week. So this is kind of like a precursor to that. Biggest challenge with that is explaining everything that I'm doing for Breaking Down the Fourth Wall in five minutes.

Yeah, good luck.

It's actually my hope to have a timelapse of a paper pattern done before I'm finished with all of them. Can't tell yet whether that'll actually happen as I only have the handplate as something that isn't finished yet, and it's not the most amazing thing. Maybe we can have a timelapse of a transfer to foam?

Time will tell. I'm going to go get the next thing done.

Brooke out.

The Sequel Machine (Part A)

So, I was all set to blog earlier this week, and then I ran out of time before the convention, and then was all set to blog right now, and remembered that I need a chip adapter to upload the progress photos from my phone, and I don't have that right now.

Basically, on Friday, the DNS server on the network timed out, so I went to fix it and somehow managed to hard reset the whole modem. So now the network needs setting up again and the owner of the modem is out for the weekend. I'm using the wireless that belongs to my church to write. And the whole time, I was like 'Huh. That's never happened before.'

My tech mishaps aside, and whatever repercussions remain, this weekend was a little hectic. The above information is only relevant because I am not at home, where the adapter-chip is, and therefore I cannot upload progress photos of the costume, and it's only the day after Animania, so I can't upload a whole lot of photos from the convention day either. But SOON. *appropriate delay* NOW.

And, I am coming to realise, I have a habit of starting a blog post with a completely unrelated story. I think it serves to break the ice or something. ANYWAY.

What am I giving again? Oh. A diagnostic on how the cosplay-making progress went, along with a review for Animania. With no real available photos. Hmm.

Oh. There's a video.

To my shame, I participated in a Harlem Shake video. Two actually. There was this one, and there was one in the auditorium near the end of the day. By then, I was hanging out with a group from Gurren Lagann, and all of us were a little too exhausted to be shaking anything vaguely Harlem-shaped. If that one arrives on youtube in the next couple of days though, I'll put it up anyway.

I'm on the far right for the initial bit, and then just right of centre after the break. And then behind the Skull Kid in the third cut, moving awkwardly to give the impression of dancing while trying to avoid poking other people in the head with my helmet.

Personally, I think the Harlem Shake is a little silly, but nevertheless, for reasons unfathomable, I participated in not one, but two. Maybe it was a 'hey, I don't have a face' moment.

Where to begin with everything else?

At the start of last week, I had a white lycra skivvy sewn up, and was prepared to use that in place of the black top I had for the character. And then I was like 'aw man, can't decide' and then was like 'hey, I'll make the white top anyway and see what it looks like'

Nek Minnut:

By Wednesday, I had the white top with black tattered sleeve sitting on a mannequin next to the already-existing black one, and realised that it would be the way to go. I didn't really want to admit it at that time, but that's kind of what happened. There was also just this sense of trying to fool myself out of it, because I knew how much work would be needed to get it done. I've never been one for holding to that kind of common sense, so I started on things anyway.

It began with detatching the bra from inside the black top and sewing a white cover onto it. The stitching was put in last time because I wanted a form-fitting top that wasn't going to migrate when I moved. Then stitched the white top on over that. Then, realising that the top still needed painting, I cracked open the dressmaker's mannequin that my parents gave me for Christmas. (It had stayed unopened for the time being, as I don't have enough space at home to justify having it out all the time.) Oh. By 'cracked open' I mean that the box was still taped up. I hadn't opened it yet.

So we opened it up and set the top on it. When it came to painting at 9pm on Friday night, it was wrapped with clingwrap so the paint couldn't leak through. Bec ended up painting the black on the front; I was preoccupied with attaching my toes. Then she crashed and I finished off the back. The next morning, I tried setting the mirror frames into it and away we went.

...

It's occurring to me now that I'm following narrative on the basis of separate articles in the costume. Would we rather follow by article or day on which these details were accomplished?

Really?

TOO BAD.

ahahahahahahahaaaaaaa *cackles*

I'll keep this way. Maybe rearrange it into something linear later.

So what else was accomplished this week?

Oh. The prosthetics!
These were started on last Saturday. I'd bought some liquid latex that was apparently okay for skin (Latex in its liquid form contains ammonia and there's types that will burn your skin in liquid state) about six months prior and began with that, some pantyhose and 3mm foam. The prosthetics for my hands were made by spreading a little latex over my finger, sticking a strip of pantyhose to it, and then waiting a little. Then I'd spread a little latex over the back of the foam piece that I'd cut, wait for it to get sticky, and then press it on. Really, the prosthetic business was a lot of waiting. Stick, wait, stick, press, hold, wait.

The shapes for the fingers started out as...what? Like a stretched pentagon. Like if you took the roof overhang away from a child's drawing of a house. Then I realised that this didn't actually gel very well with the shape of my hand or getting it to blend, so the I reshaped the foam pieces to look more like droplet shapes, and bevelled the edges. This is fiddly work, but it looked good. After that, it was a matter of waiting until the latex had dried, and then gritting teeth against the pain when trying to take the things off. Latex + hair on my fingers = worse than a bandaid. Because I'd done it to myself, and the stuff had bonded very well, and I couldn't just rip the suckers off, or the foam would come too.

The toes then were much easier. I was after a different kind of shaping, so a slight pitch was introduced into the shapes by scoring one side and hot-gluing the other, preferably without burning of fingers on the glue.
Then they were painted with acrylic, which, much to my sadness, did not mask the ballpoint pen I'd marked the individual pieces with.

Toes plus fingers plus nails.

So I had numbered toes. Brilliant. To credit though, I actually applied enough petroleum jelly to my toes to avoid all the skin being pulled off when the prosthetics came off.

Um, um, what else?

The mirrors!

I had these mirrors from last time; they're round shaving mirrors. They have a slight amount of magnification, and yeah. I just velcro-ed one onto my front last time, but wanted to step the game up a little this round. I built a 1-1.5cm rim around the edges with plaster bandage and then painted it black. Sticky back plastic (The stuff you use to cover books with that inevitably ripples or bubbles) stopped funk from getting on the mirrors during the process. And then I pierced a stack of holes around the back rim edge. Aside from bruising my fingers, this meant that I could sew the mirrors onto a webbing that went inside the top and supported the things.

Now, this webbing frame had a couple of problems. Most of them were listed under 'I can't get the edge of the top to meet up with the webbing'. I guess that's just something to fix later. Or much later down the track, when I inevitably give up on body paint forever and buy a morph suit for the flipping thing.

But that aside, it looked rather cool.

Now, morph suit. That I didn't have.

My problem with this costume last time was that I remembered to buy body paint for it, and then left that paint in Newcastle for reasons unfathomed (I forgot). That Saturday morning was thus spent combing the centre of Sydney for a costume supplies shop, where I paid $25 for five tiny tubes of paint.

This time, I remembered the paint. And ran into something else interesting.

See, water based paint lifts when you sweat. Or when it dries. Or when it comes into contact with anything, whichever comes first. So what happened was my back was painted up at 5:30am by Bec the Champion Housemate, and then I went on the train, and tried to attach the mirrors, and wore a jacket for a short period of time. By the time I got to the event, a lot of it had flaked off.

I mean, it was still cool looking. But there was definitely something within me that was sad. It should have been better! *Shakes fists in air*

Now. Next thing.

The helmet and the jaw.

These were still mostly intact from the last outing. The jaw, sadly, was slightly squashed on the way home last year though, so I had to try gluing it back into place. This was met with mild success.

The other thing that was discovered during this time though, was a texture paste in the Fibres room at uni. Magical stuff. I managed to smooth out some of the pitting and pockets on the mask that had happened as part of the creating process - removing traces of the plaster bandaging and paper mache. Then it was sanded, and repainted with a brand of spray enamel I will never buy again.

You buy $2.60 worth of spray paint, you get $2.60 worth of spray paint.

The black details on the mask were made with permanent marker and black acrylic. I actually liked the low sheen on the acrylic, in the end. I mean, I had a high-gloss finish on the mask last time, but I'd done the black entirely with permanent marker. Cheap permanent marker. It crackled and really just looked weird.
The current rendition is much better.

It was at this stage I found that there are actual differences between the character's appearance in the manga and the anime - I'd taken all my reference images from the manga initially, and then was watching the fight scene with this guy in it again.

And there it was. The back of the head was different.

This had zero effect on what I was doing, as I stuck with the manga adaption. But hey, fun fact.

Also, this round, I made a plague-mask-shaped-thing out of swimsuit lining, and glued it to the inside of the jaw. When the Hollow roars, you can't see anything beyond the white jaws. Just a black abyss.
Mine ended up being not-quite-black, due to buying white fabric and dyeing it.
But for a simple trick, it worked quite well.

Before dye

After dye. Boogying away to Basement Jaxx is the best way to pass the time with this method.

I ended up dyeing the thing twice; it came out blue the first time.

Concept.

Plague mask pattern

Brilliant Selfie material.

...

So, where to go from there?

I didn't get to fix up Zangetsu (the sword). There just wasn't time. TT.TT
So, all of this, and then getting up at 3:50am, missing the time for the first train and catching the second. Noticing double-takes even before the full regalia.
People asking for photos at Central Station.

This only comes into play when you realise that at this stage, I was not in full gear. I was, however, still partially dressed up. And the audience here were people going about everyday business. I had some fourteen-year-old-looking-kid come up and start asking what the helm was made from, and how long I'd worked on it.

"At least 60 hours,"

I think he responded with an expletive.

Anyway.

The thing was that I was not fully dressed by the time I arrived at the event. I spent an hour, cursing my non-prep, in the bathrooms, painting up and getting everything else where it needed to be. I'd not brushed my hair in two days and had to de-snarl it, and hadn't really worn in my lenses either.

That aside, they went remarkably well. I mean, my eyes are fine; I don't need any kind of eye correctives. So putting lenses in is a little weird. It's not hard to put them in - I've been watching Dad do it for as long as I can remember. But you can feel when they're in. And coloured lenses are more fun - in addition to the slight haze that I was now seeing through, there was this odd yellow ring around my vision when I was standing in low light. Of course, this is because the coloured iris that makes up a contact lens cannot dilate or constrict according to the light source. So in low light, I was able to see the lenses on my flipping eyes.

I know it should really just be treated as normal, but it still kind of weirds me out a little. But hey.

It was stressful getting everything together, but I did. Kind of. My spirit gum gave up on the 'hey, lets stick prosthetics on' and I used the latex instead. Which will stick to your skin so long as you are not sweating. hahaha. I gave up on the fake nails, as I couldn't get them to stick either. And kind of knew that if I put them on, I'd never be able to do anything else.

You know, as far as a diagnostic evaluation of this is going, it sounds like a lot of tears and stress and not much reward. But that's because I don't remember to blog about the feeling of epic when I turn around the mannequin and see the work Bec did on the black stripes on the front of the top, or see what it looks like to combine yellow contact lenses with black paint around my eyes.

It's usually easier for me to quantitatively measure negatives and qualitatively measure positives. That's why things like this are weird.

Oh. Fun fact about Brooke for the day? I found out that I actually do stress-eat. I bought two litres of custard on Friday and drank a bit over half of it in the space of an afternoon. That evening featured custard-flavoured feelings of regret.

So. Stress and the prejudging, and as soon as I stepped in the judging room I knew that I was incredibly outgunned. The people clearly part of the contest were so well dressed, added to the intimidation that usually occurs when you notice that two of them were part of Team Australia last year, and represented Australia at World freaking Cosplay Summit.

Somehow, I did not completely lose it then and there. The judges liked the helmet.

And then it was done and I exited the room, wandering off to find someone else to bug.

Ran into a couple of people I see at cons, and had conversations with others as well.

That's kind of one of the odd things about going to a con and con people. You'll have a lighthearted conversation, wander off, and then realise that you never actually swapped names. I guess that as cosplayers, you kind of already have something in common, and especially if you're cosplaying, you already have a name. And that's how you have a conversation with a complete stranger without being awkward. By dressing in the most ridiculous fashion possible and acting like it's normal.

Oh life, you so grand.

Things were bought, photos were taken. In fact, I didn't end up taking any photos. I'm kind of just hoping that the photos everyone else took will be enough, at least for that convention. Facebook has its uses, I'll concede. Admittedly, photos with anything that was larger than a phone would have been difficult for me, and my phone doesn't take high-quality photos. Ah well. There were a lot of people asking for photos, and I'll just trawl the interwebs until more of them pop up.

The train ride home was uneventful, but for catching it with another cosplayer. We yabbered over stuff and lamented glitter and the heat. Her costume required glitter and a jumper. And it was incredibly hot that day.

I also got to meet a crew from Gurren Lagann (as mentioned earlier), and swapped stories with them.

These kind of connections are good. They're weird, but they're good. We run into people at these kind of things, and share the latest projects and by turns get excited and think that the idea suggested is madness, but the right kind of madness.

I mean, I didn't get to see everyone I'm in contact with at Mini, but I'm planning on visiting Supanova, so maybe then. Not sure which costume is going to that one yet either.

And that's almost it.

So, how did the competition go? The one you poured blood and sweat and tears into?

I was entered in the 'Master Cosplayer' division, actually because 'Novice Cosplayer' is for people who haven't cosplayed before, and I had. Then there was a bunch of smaller awards in that section, which are only awarded if something is impressive enough.

I didn't win anything, but I only missed out on 'Master Crafter' by a couple of points. This meant that I went home without any awards, but that's okay. I was being measured against a bunch of people who were a league above me, and I only lost by a couple of points?

Most enthusiastic silver medalist ever. 

4th wall? Pfft.

I know, right. Two posts in a week? What, is the sky falling?
Maybe. It's been pretty wet and cold in Newcastle of late. I have to dress for snow weather in order to approach the Darkrooms at Uni, and required dunking in hot water to defrost when I got home. But still.

I guess that the upping has been a little to do with Uni. This is both work and procrastination for me; Work because I'm blogging about Uni, and procrastination because it is a more fun method than simply typing things out in Word and printing it off. What can I say? Tactile thinking is just more fun. Anyway. Here goes with the next concept I'm working with.

This is project #2 for Fibres. Being out of sequence is fun because it confuses everyone, and I feel that brings us all down to my level.

'Do you know what's going on? No? Ok. Me neither.'

The name of the module is called 'The Fabric of Myth' and relates directly to the role of fibres and textiles in myth. Golden fleeces, windbags, shrouds and string-operated GPS systems (wait. Did I just double-state something?) all relate heavily to myth and the use of textiles, and Greek myths, which are the basis for 'classical' mythology, are a bag of fun. I think I just lost my thought train.

ANYWAY.

I was originally going to create a spin on the story of Icarus and Daedalus, and make some wearable art that was wings. This got changed slightly a lot when I went to Ironfest in...wait. When was that? April. I think.
Ironfest is in Lithgow, and after trying to explain it to a few people who had no idea what I was babbling about, got simplified to 'something like a produce fair for Medieval enthusiasts'

Pictured: Sparta. Source

Ironfest is a bucketful of things more than that, because the medieval enthusiasts happen to usually be interested in things like Steampunk and Doctor Who. This fact is important. Save it for later. The fact that the festival is also held in Lithgow (which is somewhere in the Blue Mountains, in the freezing bit) means that they behave a bit different around pointy objects than the guys who run Anime conventions in the city. Go to Animania and your props need to be made from foam, cardboard or balsa wood. Go to Ironfest and people are walking around with legit swords and machetes and selling said swords and machetes and assorted pointy things.


They had things to look at and things to do, and my friends and I took great interest in Archery (that you could partake in), Horseback Archery (Which spectators could spectate but not try out (understandably)), Jousting (see above), Falconry (Also just a viewing) and the Gran Melee (guys in chainmail and half-plate armour hitting each other with swords. Do the mathematics on audience participation yourself).

All of these things were excellent, and most of them we took care to check out in detail on the Saturday rather than the Sunday.

See, for the last month, and in frightening concentration over the last three days, we had been constructing our own costumes for wearing at Ironfest. Dressing up was not mandatory but there were a lot of people at the event in varying degrees of anachronistic wear. And a gimp. And a lady with no pants.

Those last two bits are not important.

So, our group had been constructing costumes because there are only so many places where it is acceptable to wear something spun entirely from fiction.

This is where the story begins to track back to it's origin and away from tangents involving Brooke's first experience of Dutch Pancakes.

We'd made Weeping Angel costumes.

Weeping Angels are one of the monsters that grace the screen of Doctor Who. They are...wait. Mister Tennant? Care to explain?

This is going to be fun for my Tutor who actually gets to mark the work and finds just the video link.

Hi Brett!

The basic concept behind the Weeping Angels is that they can't move while you're looking at them. When you blink, they can move (frightfully quickly) and if they touch you, they send you back in time (if you're lucky) and consume the energy you would have expended in the present. If you're not so lucky they'll just kill you.

Also, we find another excellent easter egg later in the Canon of Doctor Who. Anything that takes the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel. Photographs; videos. Don't look at one in the eyes or it'll plant a seed of one in your mind. Weeping Angels seem to in general possess the same 'screw the 4th wall' tendencies that Costumers and Cosplayers display when creating.

Oh. Cosplay?
I mentioned it a while ago in this post. I guess I'll keep adding to it over time.

Cosplay = Costume Play.

Recreating a character from fiction into the real world. There's usually some degree of role play involved in there too. But why do we do it?

I think there's a combination of factors.

Retelling the myth (story)
Becoming the protagonist/character
Enjoying some kind of escape through whimsy-
Taking part in an adventure beyond desks and paper and computers.

"Can't work. Busy fighting Angels."

There may also be some identifying factor between the individual and the character portrayed (which is why I pick my cosplays carefully) or maybe the character is just very good at wiping the floor with the faces of his enemies.

That aside, I think the adventure factor is fairly prominent. In the same way that you watch a Die Hard film for the amount of things John McClane can improbably explode, people interested in the realm of Costume and Character love a good suspension of disbelief.

Ran out of bullets? You just fired 20 shots from that one magazine!

This is especially relevant in our case, because when my mates and I rocked up at Ironfest decked from head to toe in grey paint and foam wings, we got to experience the other end of the stick. We were the characters spun from fiction. The walking myth. And it was a lot of fun.

See, a good cosplay is accurate.
A great cosplay is where the wearer is willing to behave like the character.
A brilliant cosplay is when the audience completes the myth and responds appropriately to the thing being portrayed.

We had people for a radius of ten metres staring at us, murmuring 'don't blink' and the like, staring us down. Small kids followed in our wake clamouring at how we weren't supposed to move because they were looking at us.

I may have been reading too much Cracked.com in the last week.

Far from it being that they thought we were legit; the people we met that day were willing to play along because we all knew the rules to this imaginary game, and it allowed us to spin fiction into reality with quite amusing results.

When we were finishing the costumes (on the vacant lot next to Jo's relative's house), panicking and trying to remember to eat before heading out, Jo stated that he would be happy if we had one person ask for a photo.

We left on Sunday evening as very happy people.