embarrassment for posterity: the Dress-Off Saga

our FIRST EVER COSPLAY SKIT

for some unearthly reason i decided we needed to participate in the Masq at Animazement '08. my friends consented to participate. the idea had started out as an for idea video project, where we would put on shitty closet cosplays and abridge anime series- it evolved into SpeedCosplay- where participants would attempt to create a recognizable costume in a set amount of time. for a skit, all of the costume pieces obviously had to be pre-selected and pre-set. they DIDN'T have to be GOOD.



from left to right, the cosplayers are Richard, Ness, myself, (if i look fat it is because i am. god, i look SO BAD here...) and Alicia.

in case you can't tell, the characters are: (from left to right, in order:)
1. Goku and Trunks, Dragon Ball Z
2. Yugi and Kaiba, Yu-Gi-Oh
3. Inuyasha and Sesshomaru, Inuyasha
4. Henchman from Venture Brothers and Moononite from Aqua Teen, both on Adult Swim
5. Sakura, Naruto, Kakashi, and Sasuke, Naruto
6. L, Light, Mello, and Matt, Death Note

there is so much bad happening here- we'd never had the chance to practice together, we'd never been in a Con Masq before (although all of us had stage experience,) and i hadn't slept in days. the others weren't much better off. a shipment of wigs had not arrived from China, leading to some pretty ridiculous improvising, (my favourite of which was Naruto's furry yellow Bart-Simpson-esque hat-hair. my least favourite was desperately trying to find a wig for Mello, driving almost 100 miles total to get the crappy "Glinda the Good Witch" THING i ended up with, and making myself actually, physically sick because i was so stressed. good times. i have since learned about WIG STORES duh, and will never buy a Party City wig EVER AGAIN. but i digress.)

even so, it worked out- people thought it was funny. we won Best-in-Show at Animazement, and when we re-worked the skit, re-did the costumes, and changed the cast up a little, we participated in the Nekocon '08 Masq and placed.(in hindsight, i would not have entered what was basically the same skit- it was almost entirely overhauled, but it still seems unfair. we were essentially stealing the premise from ourselves...)

in the end, it's a piece of crap but i'm still proud of it. with help from my co-conspirators i created the skit, chose the characters, made about sixteen change-sheets so that everything would run smoothly (ha ha,) made sixteen shitty costumes (by made i mostly mean 'assembled from things found in thrift stores,' and edited the music, (which i'd never done before,) and performed it with almost no actual practice, and we made it almost work...

and thus, the SpeedCosplayers were born. next post: the return of the Dress-Off...