World Cosplay Summit Preliminary Round Advice

In just 8 weeks, Hyper Japan will host the World Cosplay Summit UK selections for 2015, and we couldn't be more excited! We know it takes a long time to prepare for a big competition like this, but it's never to late for some final words of encouragement and advice, right?

From our experience doing the prelims at Play Expo last October, and our journey through WCS this summer, we've prepared a few pointers that might help all would-be UK reps in November!

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• You’ve probably already decided your costumes, so take the time to perfect them. At the end of the day you want to be happy with what you produce so you can confidently display it to the judges - don’t rush it.

• Remember that the preliminary round is a 50% accuracy and technique based competition, the judges will be looking at your finish. So while getting ambitious is fantastic, a simple, yet well constructed costume will usually have an edge over a complex but unrefined build.

• Your progress book is your lifeline. You get a limited time with the judges but your book stays with them during the entire judging process [including the performance]. Put all the important details, thoughts and ideas inside it and make use of photos and samples to help illustrate your techniques. You can use it as a reference while discussing your costume to.

• As well as preparing your progress book, a helpful tip might be to rehearse the points you want the judges to notice. You likely won’t have time to discuss every tiny detail, so break down what the most important pieces are (sometimes even starting from the head and working your way down to the feet is a good way to begin) and disregard everything else, you can back that all up in the progress book if necessary.

• Additionally, it’s worth making notes on who worked on what parts of the costumes. Even if during the judging one member of the team doesn’t want to speak, make sure the one who is speaking divides their time between both builds equally.

• Give yourself ample time to rehearse with your partner, both in and out of costume. work out a contingency plan for anything that ‘could’ potentially go wrong in your performance to avoid freezing up on stage!

• If it can go wrong, it probably will. Don’t let it get you down, keep a positive attitude and remember what you’re in it for. It’s fun at the end of the day, so don’t dwell on the bad stuff.

• Your audio is just as important as your performance, a good quality recording and soundtrack can make a huge difference in your deliverance. Give yourself enough time to create a track that covers all the relevant grounds in your performance - aka any specific sound effects, swords clashing or gasps. It may mean having to act to certain cues but this shows a strong commitment - and lots of practise which will impress your audience.

• If you make use of audio learn your lines and speak them clearly - be visible! Be conscious of your audience and exaggerate any subtle movements. Consider how it looks from the judges point of view at all times. Film your practises and get opinions and feedback from friends.

• You can be working towards your performance, even when you’re technically not working on it… By listening to your audio and getting those mental cues well embedded. (For our prelims performance we lived so far away we couldn’t practise at all, so we individually worked on our cues and movements to learn the performance as best we could alone).

• Remember you are marked on your use of the stage, find ways in which to include the entirety of your allocated space, don’t stick to the centre and don’t be afraid to show your back to the audience if you need to move around.

• Make sure to get in touch with the cosplay organisers of the event way before if you have any lingering questions, whether it’s about your judging slot, your performance, any rules or regulations you might need to follow strictly. It really pays to have your back covered in these situations, where uninformed decisions can result in disqualification or a points reduction.

• Give yourself plenty of time to get to the venue before your judging slot - the last thing you need is more stress of whether or not you’re going to be there on time. If something does come up and you find you might be late - contact one of the cosplay coordinators or staff. There are a lot of things that are out of your control, and you shouldn’t let that ruin your day.

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This is of course no means an exhaustive list of "dos" and "don'ts" you're required to follow, but we thought it might be a starting point for those gearing up for the competition.

Remember to take it all with a pinch of salt, too! The WCS experience, even the preliminary rounds are about enjoying yourself and having fun. Talk to the other contestants, take photos, have a laugh and support each other!

Post-WCS Introduction

Long time no blog! I guess we overestimated the amount of spare time we would have to blog about things whilst WCS was ongoing (not gonna lie, either, we spent all of our free time hanging out with the other teams!). Now World Cosplay Summit is finished we can take some time out to share what we're doing now the competition is over - our adventure in Japan! We have so many notes and photographs still left from WCS to share, so we will do maybe an in-depth weekly-round up of each day of it when we both get back from Japan.

For now, I think we will concentrate the here and now! Each night we hope to do a small, yet informative blog on our travels through Japan, with the hopes that it will encourage people to come and visit and give some insight into the things you can see and do while you're out here! We have a number of resources helping us along the way, and it'll be nice to share this info with all of you.

The easiest way to do this, I guess, is to address it geographically. We began our tour in Nagoya; starting at Nagoya Station. Here we claimed our Japan Rail Passes, which we had applied for prior to leaving the UK. You need to do this through an operator; we used JTB who were not only extremely helpful but incredibly informative (additionally we booked our Studio Ghibli Museum tickets via them, too, but I'll go into that process later). JTB also have a number of resources on their website you can use to scout out tourist spots and helpful tips for travelling in Japan.

If you head to their FAQ page, all your questions on what the JRPass involves can probably answered there, but for a quick explanation, basically it's a pass available to visitors from outside Japan that allows you to travel for a number of days around the entire country at an extremely discounted price. You can cheapen it further by limiting the destinations to East, West, Central etc or by cutting down the number of days which you would like to travel. Emi and I are travelling around at the moment on a 7-Day JRPass, it allows us to travel anywhere within Japan on the train and Shinkansen (bullet train) starting from the day which we activated it - so although we were in the country for 2 weeks prior to travelling, it didn't begin until we activated it at Nagoya station. 

We would both highly recommend it, as it's an insane value for money. To put it into perspective - we paid 11,000 yen each for a single ticket between Tokyo and Nagoya, which works out at around £50 I think. That's 1/3 of the price of our pass done already, and we've only traveled one journey. Throughout the holiday we have planned seven journeys all across the country, it's definitely a worthwhile investment.

Train isn't the only way to see Japan, either, there's also the Experience Japan Fare by ANA which is a set-fare for foreign visitors to use air travel within the country. You can find more info on their Website, but we will also be blogging about this later on when we visit Yufuin! (Also, I'm not gonna lie, that site is super useful in general for finding cool places to eat and visit, will probs write about it later, too!)

Aside from all the travel malarkey, we have been gifted with an NTT Docomo portable wifi hotspot to update and share pictures, as well as help us get around here! You can pick these nifty gadgets up from a number of websites and at any airport in Japan. I'm pretty sure the way it works is by connecting to a 3G signal and working as a data-tethering thingy. I'm not hot on the technical details, I'm sure you can find out on their website (one of a few out there) - what I do know is that it works so well and I'm not sure how we would get around without it!

At the moment we're on the second night of our holiday, we visited Kinosakionsen yesterday, and traveled to Hiroshima today. I think it's safe to say we're seasoned Shinkansen veterans right now, and we're both pretty relieved that the bullet train is almost a pleasure to travel on - it's a million miles away from National Rail in the UK where you're lucky if you have a working toilet on your cross-country voyage. Just as well, since we have a lot more travelling to go!

Tomorrows blog update will include a full write up of our trip from Nagoya to Kinosakionsen, and our Shinkansen adventure from there to Hiroshima. Please look forward to it!!

Pre-WCS : What it's like to be a rep?

Before I entered WCS prelims, there was a long list of things on my lips I wanted to know about. 

It's a fairly serious commitment, and there are a lot of things that you have to invest into it; time, money, energy, more money – so it's good to know if what you're signing up for is actually what you want to do.

Luckily for myself and Emi, our alumni were more than helpful to fill in what WCS would expect from us. What they like the look of on stage, how best to conduct ourselves in judging and so on. There were a few things, though, that even we ourselves didn't expect, and we would have never been able to prepare a question to get those answers.

As a sort of personal anecdote, I feel really lucky that Emi and I haven't come to blows over WCS this year. There's a lot of difficulties we've had like living nearly 200 miles apart, from working around jobs to not having a job at all, but somehow we've come to the end of the road with our friendship intact. Both of us have seen the strain of competitive cosplay almost (and in some cases, entirely) ruin friendships, lead to resentment, so this blog entry today is going to attempt to detail in an honest, warts-and-all way, some of the issues Emi and I have come across in the last 8 months in the hopes that future representatives can learn from our mistakes!

First of all; I hope you and your would-be partner have a pretty steadfast friendship. This might sound like an obvious one – what would you be doing entering with someone you weren't good friends with, right??  Whether you plan it to or not, a lot of things can get in the way of a harmonious partnership, it's difficult to speculate on where it all starts because between different people you get different ideas of what matters. It's hard to gauge, too, how invested another person is in what you're doing, so really knowing your partner and laying down some ground rules about what is and isn't okay at the times you're meant to be working on costumes is pretty important.

I'm pretty sure I brought Emi to almost breaking point a few times across the year when I put my work in eSports first. It's way too easy to get caught up in other commitments you have and forget to reassure your partner that you are invested in the work you're both doing and you haven't forgotten them. I think I worried Emi a lot this past year by not showing progress when it mattered, and especially May Expo, I devoted all of my time preparing for the show instead of working on the preliminary outfits we meant to trial run that weekend.... And when I did get it done I was so busy I couldn't even wear them. Oops.

So mistakes were made there, and that was one which was totally avoidable and completely my fault. I got overconfident in my ability to pull a costume out of nowhere and forgot to reassure Emi that I had things under control and got carried away.

I'm not saying that WCS is or should be the main commitment in your life at the time of doing it; but you do feel like there's a small amount of pressure on you. I have a responsibility not to let down my partner, the country I'm representing, or cosplay as a hobby when I'm out there; I frequently have to remind myself I'm not alone in this, and if I screw up, other people feel the consequences, too.

As I mentioned before, distance was an issue. I'm all the way up in Newcastle and Emi lives in Manchester. I'm sure you guys down South must be thinking, "what but the North is so small, those two places must be a small train ride from each other!"

Wrong!

Emi and I live near enough 200 miles apart, which when we got down to it, made coordinating matching costumes a slight problem. To keep the uniformity we decided to work on our championship costumes exclusively at Emi's place, it seemed like a smart decision at the time (and I guess I feel like it's still a good one now, they look identically made) but it really limited the time we had available to us to work on them. The contract for the job I was working finished in January, which left me unemployed, and as you can imagine, I needed to be careful with my money (I'll go into the financial issues we faced later). So what I should have been doing was travelling to Manchester whenever possible suddenly became an insurmountable obstacle; how do I even work on the costumes if I have no money?

We spent the first few months of this year sourcing all our fabric, planning the costumes, performance and set. Our preparation time was insane, really, and I honestly hope that at least, shows in what we do.

In the last few weeks I feel like neither of us have had a break; I finish work on Friday, travel straight to Manchester from work, sew for 4 days then get the train back to Newcastle to start work again on Wednesday.

All in all, looking at the results now – it was worth it. Our costumes have this uniformity that we would never have been able to achieve if we hadn't worked together on both of them. It helped us play to both of our strengths, too, and countered our respective weaknesses. Just the journey itself was a toughie; if I were to go into a competitive team with someone who lived across the country from me again, I think it'd definitely think more seriously about choosing two costumes that wouldn't need to match so much.

Money was a big issue for the pair of us, understandably. Because it's easy to think; we have a year, plenty of time to fund four costumes? If that was all we had to pay for then maybe it would have been fine. I think for a pair with steady, full time jobs and good money management everything else that comes into it wouldn't be a problem.

As it stands, the pair of us are part-timer graduates, not exactly made of money. On top of the costumes, the set, the persistent cross-country travel, excess baggage, new suitcases and everything we would need for our holiday FOLLOWING the competition (because don't kid yourselves, you are gonna wanna stay a little longer and enjoy the sights!)... We're a little strapped for cash to say the least, and it was a huge learning experience in itself to have to be so careful with what we invested in.

I think what we discovered the most is good research, spreading the cost across longer periods of time and knowing what you are going to need when you get there really helps. A lot of this we discovered learning from our WCS alumni mistakes; they make them so you don't have to!

The last thing I wanted to touch on is the big one; time. I've mentioned earlier that we already had problems getting together to work on things, but that's really only the tip of the iceberg. Surprisingly when Emi and I sat down together and thought about it, we didn't actually have that many pair costumes – weird for two people who have apparently been cosplaying together for 3 years now! (I feel like I should take the blame for this one, though, because as everyone knows I am oh so good at sticking to my deadlines...)

Finals costumes are bad enough to work on without making at least three other parade costumes, too. It didn't take us long to decide on a few things we wanted to do; and we started on them immediately to get them out of the way. Unfortunately it happens, as it so often does, that we both had some issues with some of the things we planned. My Satsuki costume had become a logistical nightmare, I remade the costume 3 times before having to be restrained from setting fire to what was left. Emi ended up buying 5 metres of the wrong type of fabric for Ryuko. We attempted to custom dye all the fabric for CardCaptor Sakura costumes, only to have the dye split and spot dark blue and yellow everywhere. Things were not going well.

Somehow we managed to pull two more costumes out of our butts; something that will make us more comfortable in the Japanese weather but, ironically, a little out of our comfort zones. I'm looking forward to announcing them next week once we get photos of everything!

Another thing that I suppose comes under the umbrella of "oh god there's not enough time THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME!!!!" is forms. So many forms. You will have to fill out forms and questionnaires until you are literally crying tears of answers and they are mopping them up with the sheets. Decide now what your favourite anime is, the reason you love cosplay, what you want to do in Nagoya, all of these things you will be asked on several different occasions!

Also, being prepared with an idea of how you want the lighting and actions to go during your performance will help a lot. There is a several page long sheet to fill out prior to the contest with very specific timings and cues required for the production staff to work around it. I think part of it has to do with basically, where the cameras should be at certain points, how best you want the lights to emphasise your skit and so the stage runners can set up and take down as quickly as possible. I'm told there's something insane like a 40 second window either side to get everything on and off the stage, so going in prepared and knowing exactly where you are going to be really helps the staff.

So this entry ended up being a little long winded. When I sat down to think about it, more and more thoughts just kept pouring out of my fingertips and onto the screen, so apologies if there's a lack of structure or clarity to this particular post.

Hopefully it's given some insights into the ~personal~ world of ours, and I guess the overall feeling is that bad stuff does happen! You just have to roll with it, and not get too hung up on the small things. The entire idea of the experience is to have fun an enjoy the culture and the community, and remember – all the bad stuff will probably disappear when you get there~

Championship Choices

As it's competition season, I thought it might be interesting to delve into the subject of competition costume choices. 

Before we go into it, I guess I should put out a disclaimer: neither myself nor Emi are claiming to be authorities on ~what to pick to win competitions~, the idea for this blog today is to just discuss our personal thought process behind what we have chosen for each leg of WCS and what we have learned from previous generations of WCS contestants, as well as our peers in the competition this year.

First of all I guess I should pose the question; what makes you decide to enter a competition in the first place? For Emi and I, I think it was a combination of a few things. We've both watched several of our close friends go through a few international competitions. Their feats were not only inspiring and encouraging, but they came with a warning: competitions are hard work, and they put even the closest friendships to the test. 

The potential of driving each other so mad I end up trying to throttle her with bias binding while she stabs me in the face with dressmaking pins... With neither of us being particularly competitive, this potentially deadly outcome wasn't really worth it. 

When we went to Japan Expo in 2012 and watched two of our friends compete in the European Cosplay Gathering, however, got us thinking; maybe we could, too? What comp would we enter? What would we wear? It slowly became a past-time of ours to just imagine scenarios, performances, costumes we could potentially enter any given competition with.

Fast forward a year; in the run up to Play Expo, Emi and I hit on some inspiration for some costumes we wanted to make. An ambitious task, but one we were both motivated and actually did a fair amount of work on before the horrible realisation hit us.... These costumes were not going to get done. We had bitten off more than we could chew.

You can probably see why. We started putting things together for these outfits in July, but by September we still weren't that far ahead and, in fact, really struggling to find important elements like the correct colour fabric and the right wig. 

In the end, around 3 weeks before Play Expo we did something totally unheard of and super unusual for UK cosplayers - [as if!] we changed our costume ideas. We changed to simpler costumes we knew we could execute well and concentrated on a strong performance to go with it.

At the end of the day, I'm happy we did. We were able to tap into a series we were both not only passionate about, but we could come up with an interesting and dynamic skit, too. Although they lacked the small detailing of the Eternal Sonata outfits, our Tsubasa ones were finished - and well. We even put pockets in my trousers - POCKETS!!

The moral of this story wasn't totally lost on us - whatever we would go into the championships with had to follow a core set of rules we would set down for ourselves, so we didn't get lost like we did going into the prelims. We were offered advice from the previous WCS Team UK reps and took it all on board. It took us a while to come to our decision, but when we set it in stone it was one we were both very happy with, and most importantly excited to get to work.

The first piece of advice we were offered by our predecessors was that in Japan they love a few things on the championship stage. They love things that are very ~Japanese~ and hand in hand with that they also love the feeling of nostalgia. So before I sharpied on my Kochikame eyebrow to invoke that feeling of audience nostalgia, Emi discussed that nostalgia wasn't really for us, but we would both love to do a costume that embraced a traditional Japanese feeling and matched the setting we were lucky enough to be placed in.

We made a dropbox and shared a whole lot of artbook and reference pictures of various series and characters we could potentially do. Lots of things were taken out because of the difficulty of wearing or moving in them. One thing we had to keep in mind was - regardless of whether we were being "competitive" or not (which we weren't) - we would be on stage in front of a live audience, as well as being filmed and streamed online. We needed costumes with a fluid and easy movement, and something that stood out. Unlike a lot of walk-on-walk-off cosplay comps, something like Trinity Blood wasn't going to be an option for us.

I'm not sure how we settled on Tsubasa again in the end. I know we both had wanted to do those particular outfits for a long time and we'd done it once before. It took us a while to decide to deviate from the matching outfit for Syaoran, however. We needed a certain dynamic in our performance that just wasn't filled with his white outfit, and the "Clone" fit the bill perfectly. Lots of billowing, lots of flowing. We had found our fit!

Last time, and in this case in particular, it was a case of Fine Detail vs Performance Value. We played to what we decided our strengths were, that we unfortunately didn't have the money, resources or skills available that would be required in a highly technical and complex costume build (see ECG Team/Solo 2014). We decided for WCS in particular, that since the performance aspect is heavily weighted, we would focus our efforts there.

Thinking back on all of this now makes me kind of nervous. If we'd started hand embroidering that Trinity Blood cape or resin casting that Hero Suit last year would we be looking any better now? I'm not really sure, I guess. 

Choosing something for the sake of it being big and impressive is fair enough when you can pull it off, but the best way Emi and myself felt we could do the UK proud in Japan was stick to our guns. Cosplay something we love. Show everyone what we can do with what we have. I think that's the best advice I could give anyone going in for a big competition like this; it's as easy as cosplaying something you love. It shows in the way you move and act on stage and it shows in the way you've made your costume. 

Plus, and maybe most importantly, when it comes to crunch time and you and your partner are knee deep in offcuts and pattern pieces and ready to wrestle each other out of a window, you can take a step back from it all and just remember what you're in it for. 

Unless you're in it for the cash dolla. Then always think about the cash dolla.