Drive and Burnout

For reasons unbeknownst, this post actually has nothing to do with cars. I mean, it could. I could begin to talk about how Sutto reckons I don't have 'GTi love' (He's one of the other Suzuki Swift drivers at church) and how I argue back that I do and it's different to his appreciation of the machines (it is). Or we could talk about how this really just proves that I am way too willing to rise to a goading.

"Sutto, You merely adopted the GTi love. I was born in it."

But this post isn't about cars.

This post is about Animania, an anime convention held in Sydney in March and September. It kind of relates to a couple of other blog posts that I've made before, so if you want to do some extra reading you can check out my post on Animania here, or the other themes of this post here, or the rest of my university work that's related to Bleach and the concept of the Hollow here. (And there. And everywhere.)

Now that I've just done a considerable amount of plugging for the blog, and you can see how much I've written about Bleach, I can assume that you'll be up to speed when I start talking.

Also, uni.

Directed Studies is taking up a lot of my mental space. I end up doing the headless chicken thing over it. The headless chicken thing is basically "oh man I have this much stuff to do in this amount of time and theresnotenoughtimetodoanythingwhattheheckamIsupposedtodoohcrapohcrapohcrap"
Part of that is my newest and biggest thing, which will be the topic of the next blog post, and part of this is trying to get Animania's costume done in time.

I mean, the one I'm taking down is Ichigo again. September's effort. But it was so well received  I kind of decided to see if I could enter it in the cosplay competition Animania runs, and March Animania is a bit smaller (and therefore the cosplay competition pool is smaller, right? *laughs nervously*). So, I have a costume to take. I'm just trying to tweak it; make it better and more streamlined. More scary?

I dunno. But I bought yellow contact lenses for it, and I'm wearing them now, and the whole world is a little hazy for it because my eyes are going what is this thing sitting on my eyeballs and every time I walk past a reflective surface my mind is going what in the blue hell is wrong with my eyes?

Friiiiick. I've lost the adapter for my phone memory card again. That thing is going to take ages to find again.

Wait. Here it is.

So I guess it's kind of working. How it will turn out when I add it to the face paint and mask/helmet I can't tell.

But at the moment, this is kind of taking up all of my mental space. And at the same time I'm remembering that hey, you have admin stuff to do for that, huh? And it's not fun.

But.

Animania is next Saturday. I'm putting in the entry form tonight, so I don't forget and miss out like I did last year. And hopefully everything will be together and I'll have one less thing to worry about.

So, my current dilemma is mostly this:

*Also, spoilers and stuff for the storyline of Bleach. Just a heads up.*

Ichigo, for those who don't follow Bleach, is a bloke.

The state in which I am cosplaying him has him in a berserker state. He's battle-damaged, and busy being not human. Busy being hollow and kerb-stomping the fourth Espada. By battle-damaged, I mean this:

Now, the casually observant person might note that giant pointy mask and hole-in-the-chest aside, he's not wearing anything on his chest. Generally, this is not a problem for guys.

I approached the problem and solved it thus:

And torn sleeve was extended to torn-bit-of-fabric-top-for-practicality-and-common-decency.

Now. This challenge that I'm rolling with at the moment stems from a couple things.

1. I want to cosplay it better/closer to accurate.
2. I'm going down by myself and not having to cover my own back in body paint would be handy.

This week I sat down and sewed a form-fitting, long sleeve top, with the hopes of getting that to stand in and do the white-skin and bare-chest business. I was just planning to kind of strap myself into it and away we'd go. But the top didn't quite work out as well as planned.

So now, I either have to do some extra tailoring to it, or do some more thinking.

I could do the same as before, with the top in white and some black stripes across it.
Or I could keep trying with the white all-in top.

But I don't have enough fabric to do both, or do one and then change if it doesn't work halfway.

Of course, I could go 'stuff all of this' and take the pre-existing top anyway.
But probably not.

I dunno. I really want to keep it looking accurate, but at the same time don't want to sacrifice how I look for that more than I have to. I mean, I'm not seven foot tall and built like a tank anyway. Even if I manage to get the top sorted, I'm still 163cm tall, with a slightly pudgy stomach and hips and waist that could never pass for male. So should I bother?

The other challenge I have to consider is making the hollow hole look more like a hole. I'm working on something with mirrors, and am pretty sure I can get that to work at least. It really just needs something rigid I can fix it to, and then I'll pop a short tube/lip thing over it and extend the amount of black space and hey presto! Hole!

I realise that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense reading like this, but my head is making a card house out of tesseracts at the moment and isn't fussed with trying to explain.

Oh yeah. You should totally check out what a tesseract is. Best wikipedia sidetrack I've had in a long time.

But I digress.

The top is my current situation. I've also got to repair the jaw (it got squashed a little on the way home in Spetember), make some alterations to the mouth, and try and get some spiny-knuckle-prosthetics. I have foam and latex, and I'm not afraid to use it.

And this time. THIS time, I will remember to bring the body paint I bought and not get twenty minutes on the train and remember I left it at home.

In conclusion?

I'm going to a convention next week. It's going to relate to Directed Studies, because culture and costumes and documentation and stuff. I've still got a lot of things to do. My brain has been operating at 150% and has started making the kind of warning sounds that say 'you should probably pull over and change the oil now.'
But hey. Sleep when you're dead, right?

If anyone wants to give me their opinion on how to finish the top on this costume, please do so. The blogs are set up to allow non-bloggers to comment. And even if you want to log in, you can do it with a google account, I believe.

Okay. One blog post down. Let's jump onto the next thing.

Breaking Down the Fourth Wall - Introduction

Rough introduction:

This is my last year of uni. At the end of last year, I found that enrolling for this year had to happen  waaaaay earlier than usual, and that there was a course I could do called 'Directed Studies'. To sum the course up briefly, Directed Studies is the course where you decide the content. You determine the content and then fulfill it.

Now, for those new to the blog, I'm an aspiring costume designer, and a cosplayer on the side. I studied Fine Arts because I thought it would help with the learning-to-design-costumes-bit, but in actual fact it has been more about producing art. Funnily enough.

Sometimes this has worked in my favour, but for the most part, if I wanted to design costumes for uni, I had to think of a way to justify them to fit the design brief we were given. This was fun at times, but also a little tedious. I was, for the most part, basically doing the costumes in my own time and on the side, and they've been getting better, but I haven't been able to properly claim it as my own field of expertise when comparing to other classmates, who actually get paid for their artworks.

And then Directed Studies came along. An opportunity to do something that maybe the university doesn't have as a proper elective. The rest is not quite yet old enough to be called history.

What does that have to do with the price of fish and the title of this blog post?

Tuesday was my first lecture for the class, where we sat, huddled in the AT lecture theatre, also known as the coldest lecture theatre on campus.

Make sure you bring Blue Fire.

Seriously. I'm going to show up there in snow gear one day. Maybe that will get the message across.
Yes, I know that it's nearly impossible to fall asleep in a cold room, but do you think you could ease up a little? I am not friends with cold.

Anyway. Lecture. And have explained to us the nature and documenting business that we'll need to invest in for the subject, so that our lecturers have something to mark at the end of semester. One of the suggestions for marking the research and progress was a blog.

You don't say?

This afternoon, I thought for a bit about whether I wanted to set up a blog that was completely new, annexed onto my main blog (this one) or go and use my DeviantART for the project. I decided on this one, because URL battles are a challenge, and I really, really don't need another website at this present time (next to two blogs, a deviantART and a youtube channel. And a Facebook page.). Plus, all the current readers can be kept up to date with my latest piece of madness!

Success!

Anyway. That brings me to the name.
Anyone out there who is aware of stage/dance works and fiddling would recognise the term 'fourth wall'. It's the wall that the audience looks through into the realm of fiction, where the other three walls make up the containing environment for the characters to interact with. But with certain bits of fiction, and at certain times during the fiction, you have a character become aware of the fourth wall.

Wait, let me see if I can find an example.

Words can not express how much I love this movie. Anyway. Skip to 1:05 if you don't feel like sitting through a bunch of snippits from The Emperor's New Groove and having something to giggle at. Although really, I think that those bits are all punchlines. You need to whole joke to have a proper laugh.

1:05-1:22, cool?

Kuzco, at this point, isn't engaging with the narrative. He's directly addressing the fourth wall, and subsequently the audience.

My project, which is about costume-making, kind of works with that. I'm taking established characters from fiction and pulling them through the fourth wall into reality.

Wow. I have been in art school way too long.

That's the theory of it anyway. The practical will look like costumes. And madness too, I suppose.

More info on costumes, ideas and progress later. I've just realised that it's Friday arvo and remembered that I actually wanted to watch the rest of The Emperor's New Groove. Talking llamas, here we come.