Sakuracon 2013

Evening dance party

The month began with one convention, with a few days in the middle, and concluded with another convention--that being Sakuracon.  This marks a one year anniversary since the last cosplay montage video I posted prior to everything in my life undergoing a huge change (moving to Germany, etc.).  A return to normality hasn't quite yet been achieved, but it's getting close.  This year, being without any video stabilization equipment, I decided to make an attempt at being "Mr. Photographer."  However, I don't really consider myself to be a photographer but instead just a GWC (guy with camera--minus the negative connotation).  This year I just wanted to relax and leisurely take-in the Sakuracon experience, without any obligations, snapping pictures here and there, while letting spontaneity take over.

Haruna Luna X Eir Aoi

Sakuracon is a pretty unique convention in that many Japanese artists, singers, and industry members attend every year.  Sakuracon seems to have the most non-English speaking attendees I've ever encountered at an Anime convention.  I actually found the Japanese performers Eir Aoi and Haruna Luna just nonchalantly walking around the convention site with translators in tow.  At the time I didn't know who they were but it was interesting to see them being treated as "normal" people (amid having some level of niche fame) in that they're weren't recognizable or really known by anyone on this side of the pond.

"Japonese" Hot dogs

The weather during the convention was perfect for another year in a row.  I ate a "Japanese" hot dog, which I half-expected to be a normal hot dog slathered in corn and mayonnaise but in reality came in a variety of Asian-themed varieties.  I ordered a "Matsuri," it was pretty good.

Lux

Lux X Garen

Lux X Garen

Asuna

I bumped into a few more "up-and-coming" local cosplayers and did a couple impromptu "mini-shoots."  The first is RikkuGrape from Portland, Oregon.

Ahri

Ahri

And the second is Caitastrophic Cosplay, also from Portland.

D3

K'

Ganondorf X Zelda

Much of my time at Sakuracon was spent just casually taking in the sights.  I've been experimenting with some interesting photo editing style--incorporating atmospheric surreal complementary color grading and different unique ways to frame images.  I believe in a minimalist's philosophy of "less-is-more" when it comes to design.  The surreal color blended photos make me a bit conflicted as they pretty much go against that philosophy.  However, by comparison, the unedited photos lack a certain level of desirable "punchiness" which is my justification for making these edits.  Regardless, it's all done to learn and tryout new design techniques and ideas.

All-in-all, this year's Sakuracon was good as usual.  I noticed a marked decrease in the number of Hatsune Miku cosplays (is her legacy finally beginning to fade?) that were in attendance.  This year by comparison, the convention could be described as SAOkuraCon (Sword Art Online being the dominant IP).  Here's to another year in the interim!  And the rest of my photos:

Garen

Tira

MikuDonalds

Slenderman on stilts

Sejuani, there's a guy in that fur suit oven.

Gundam

Yoko

Vanquish

Mokujin

Zant

Gettin' My Nerd On

This weekend a friend invited me to attend Emerald City Comic Con or ECCC, here in Seattle (the Emerald City), and while I'm not sure if I would've attended this event without an invitation, it was an enjoyable experience.  I only attended a portion of one day but I managed to stroll around the maze that is the Washington state convention center taking a couple photos and just hanging out.  A lot of pretty well-known TV / movie celebrities were in attendance like Patrick Stewart and Christopher Lloyd--however, taking pictures in the room where the celebrities were situated was strictly forbidden.  To clarify, you have to pay on average $30-40 up to $85 just to get either an autograph or your picture taken with a celeb--which in my opinion is insane, but I guess that's pretty much the main incentive for these individuals in taking the time to attend these events (time is money).

Asian gandalf

Samurai Boba Fett

League of Legends X Link [Zelda] (I think)

Sentinel

I guess these kinds of things are also what separate fans from regular enthusiasts.  However, I think the term fan has lost some of its meaning in English, being that there's been an introduction of the dichotomy of whether one is actually a fan or a true fan...  Fan stems from the Americanized shortening of the word fanatic [a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal, as in religion or politics.], people usually associate a "religious fanatic" as having pretty negative connotations however, somehow being a religious fan or perhaps a fan of religion is somehow more acceptably tame.  English is becoming more complicated than it should be and evolving too quickly.  I guess I don't really like using the term fan when describing myself or perhaps I'm just over-thinking things again.  Regardless, it's interesting to see people exhibit such passion for their preferred entertainment choices at comic con.  

Pawnstars spinoff (?)

There was a TV film crew present at ECCC, filming a pilot for something related to cosplay for the SyFy channel from what I understand.  I don't know too many details but it looked kind of like a cheesy reality TV style show format.  

Other notable events included getting to meet the "cosplay famous" Jessica Nigri, also hailing from Arizona, who is also apparently making a solid living as a promotional model--not a bad gig.

Finally, I managed to squeeze in a small "photo-shoot" with an up-and-coming local PNW cosplayer, Meepy-Gal.  Having lost pretty much all my filming equipment in my move back to the US from Germany, I made an attempt in trying out cosplay photography--it's something I'm really not used to doing as I feel I have a decent eye for motion but haven't really put much thought into suggesting aesthetically pleasing static poses.  Thankfully Meepy-Gal is a natural at posing so there's less needed from my end.  It's all done for fun though.

Cosplay Featurette - Kara aka Electric Lady

Here's the featurette video highlighting some of the work done by Kara aka Electric Lady.  It was great working with her at the various locations we explored around Seattle and I'd be happy to do it again.  Will I be doing "featurettes" for other people?  Possibly, it primarily comes down to the cosplayer and whether they are willing to invest the time and effort required to fulfill something like this.  Our efforts are summarized and compiled into the following final video:



I believe releasing this video also marks the beginning of the end, with my intention to; take a break / retire / go on a hiatus / sabbatical / etc.  The length is as of yet unknown and is being done for a few different reasons.  If I manage to attend another convention, hopefully it will be one where my Spectre is debuting.   See you then!

Sakuracon 2012 - 02

2nd and final Sakuracon coverage (montage) video follows:



Will upload the cosplayer feature video tomorrow morning.

Sakuracon 2012

Yesterday concluded the year's Sakuracon event at the Washington state convention center in Seattle.  It was another great year with amazing weather--cool days with clear skies.  Since this year's Sakuracon was nearly a month earlier than last, the event actually coincided with the Sakura blooms around the city.  While there aren't many Sakura trees around the actual convention site (that I know of), the overlap allows for good opportunities to go off-site to take pictures or do video, etc.

I met up with a lot of cool people and had a great time at this year's event.  However, security was quite a bit more obnoxious. 

This year I wanted to be a little ambitious and try a few new things with regard to video.  While I made some attempts, the outcome wasn't very successful so I won't be able to provide immediate results.  Looking at my post from last year's Sakuracon I can say that I'm probably as well versed in the culture / scene as everyone else and it's interesting to see that I managed to pull 3 videos from 20 gbs of raw footage.  This year's tally hovered around  32gb of video and I'm aiming to release 2 videos and 1 short feature. 

I had the pleasure of getting to work with Electric lady who came out from Arizona and she likewise agreed to participating in my lofty / insane ideas which I greatly appreciated (most people are unwilling to invest their time and energy, though with possibly good reason). I took a few teaser photos from our adventures, here's one:

It took some time but I managed to crank out both my first video from Sakuracon and the feature video I did for Electric lady.  However, I'm saving the latter video for the final release.  In the meantime, take a look at release #1:

The Drift Doctor has arrived!

The very first post of this blog nearly 3 years ago was titled, "Birth of a drift doctor."  The term seemed a bit vague but this post brings everything full circle as the Drift Doctor has finally arrived!

 Just waiting for people before starting my exam.













 Trying to show that my work left a lasting impact in my field.










 



A few days ago I passed my final defense after a grueling four and a half years and graduated with my PhD.  This blog isn't intended to be concerned with that.  However, it helps to clarify why the blog is titled the way it is.  So while I've legitimized the doctor part of driftdoctor.com, I've kinda fallen away from the drift aspect which stems from my love of cars, speed, and driving.  In the future I hope to correct this deviation and get back into the car scene.

There weren't any updates last week as my attention was diverted to passing my exam.  Now that I seem to have a bit more time on my hands, hopefully I can make some progress on the projects I've been working on.

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Helmet

The good stuff starts now. 

 Probably the most interesting part of the spectre is its helmet--the real deal has a multi-piece visor that pops out and swivels and does all sorts of craziness.  While it would be nice to be able to do all that, it's a bit beyond my skill level at this point in time.  However, there are lights galore, which definitely will be added later for effect.  The helmet is locked in the closed position which may be disastrous in terms of airflow, etc. but I'll figure it out as I go.

My bff across the country in NY managed to produce the base form-work of the helmet from which I'll be building upon to eventually finish.  He did a great job up to this point, but time has eluded him so I'll be taking over now.  It started as a nicely detailed pepakura model which was scaled from a life-cast model of my head.  The pep model was affixed to the cast head and expanding foam was used to fill in the gaps.  The outer pep surface was then smoothed out a bit with bondo and a few details were added with apoxie sculpt.  Right now the helmet is permanently bound to the head casting.  This means that once the helmet is finished, it will need to be molded and slush-cast or roto-cast to yield the finished, wearable shell. 

After working with the leg and shoe models in previous updates and having experienced the never-ending perpetual add-material-sand-repeat process--I'll be experimenting with a different approach for the helmet.  I picked up some Monster Clay which is a professional grade modeling clay used for creating masks, props, replicas, and other wild stuff.  It seems to be a popular medium used by those in industry and Hollywood--it should fit the bill I think.  I essentially coated the helmet with monster clay and will next spend time adding details and trying to "sculpt" the surface.  After working with it for a few hours, my impression is that this clay is pretty great.  Monster clay has zero tack which is absolutely crucial for achieving perfect surfaces and textures.  Apoxie sculpt is great too but it has a decent amount of tack which is really annoying when more material sticks to your gloves than the surface you're working on.  Another great thing about monster clay is that it's incredibly rigid at room temperature.  This requires you to heat the clay (microwave / oven) till it's pliable, add material to your surface, and then when it's cool the clay is firm enough to allow more precise sculpting and the adding of details. 

However, I must add that I'm not a sculptor and have not really worked very much with clay, so it's going to be a learn-as-I-go experience.  Right now the helmet looks pretty ugly with my shoddy clay-forming skills but hopefully it'll begin taking shape with future updates.

SC2 Spectre Cosplay Update

Weather has been bad lately, too cold and too rainy, so I haven't been able to think about priming the legs.  I continued sanding the shoes a bit more, and more sanding and smoothing is needed yet still...

Soon in the future I'll likely begin working on the helmet bit as well.

A link to the pep file for the legs / shoes can be found here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?i5f64w5vj64eoaj

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 11 + Shoes

I'm making very slow progress as usual--I'm  pretty much limited to working on the project during the weekend as by the time I get home from work during the week, it's pitch black outside.  Temperatures are still on the cold side so that's going to hinder the painting process.  Hopefully things start to warm up soon... California cosplayers probably don't appreciate their amazing weather enough. 

Anyway, smoothing of the "leg bits" continues, they're pretty much done I believe--the next step(s) should be to give them a coat of primer if weather permits.  I'm pretty excited to see what the legs will look like when they're a uniform color, although surface unevenness will be amplified.

The shoes are also going through the slow "build-up and smoothing" process and are slowly making headway.  It seriously looks like I haven't done anything in the picture below due to the ugly patchiness, but I insist that it's a lot better than it was last week.  Baby steps, to be continued...

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 10 + Shoes

Tried smoothing out the detail bits on the legs but apoxie sculpt is pretty tough stuff to sand down, takes a lot of passes to level.  It's coming along fairly well though.  I think the legs are nearly done and ready to be primed and cut.

As far as the shoes are concerned, the body filler / sanding process is currently underway and the process is pretty terrible (dust EVERYWHERE).  It'll take a few goes at it before it starts getting somewhat uniformly smooth.  I'm not sure if I'm going to  leave the Sintra exposed or if I should coat it with a thin layer of something.  The easy way out it to leave it as it is, but part of me thinks I should cover it...

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 9

Smoothing the legs continues and I think I may have reached my breaking / satisfaction point.  I forgot to add the raised detail bits on the sides of the legs earlier so the preliminary version of these detail bits were added (seen below).  The next step will be to sand and shave them to spec, which may be extremely difficult because they're hollow (pepakura shells underneath apoxie sculpt).

In the disaster strikes update (#7) I mentioned that I couldn't get my feet into the modified shoes until after cracking the fiberglass shell at the top.  Continuing from that point, I cut out the fiberglass formwork and constructed a new piece from sintra (closed-cell PVC foamboard) and glued it into place.  The new piece was extruded outwards about an inch to give sufficient clearance for my foot when trying to put the shoes on--and it works, I don't need to cut chunks out of my feet now!  Seams were filled with apoxie sculpt and will be sanded down later.  Next steps will involve lots of bondo, shaping, and sculpting again.

Here's the reference again:

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 8

So the current state of the Spectre project is that progress on the shoes are currently on hold for now.  I think the current plan is to cut out and remove the pep/fiberglass material and build a similar shape out of sintra (pvc sheeting) that's spaced out from the shoe itself.  Once that's done and looks good I'll begin work on smoothing out the exterior of the shoes.

I've also been slowly trying to smooth out the legs more and more.  I found there to be a lot of holes in the body filler that require filling with apoxie sculpt and the entire process is a gigantic pain.  I don't know if it's my bad technique but I find the body filler to be extremely sticky--setting way too fast.  If I try to smooth out an area that I've applied material over, the filler will catch on my spreader as I make a second smoothing pass and mess up the surface.

I also nearly forgot to add the raised detail slats to the sides of the legs--so I'll do that, make some finishing touches, and then determine where to cut slices out of the legs so that I can actually wear them.  It's gonna be pretty nerve wracking making cuts after I've spent so much time getting the legs to this point.  Not sure how I'm planning to fasten them to my legs either, might need to make two cuts or a single giant cut through the entire backside.

SC2 Spectre Cosplay: Legs 7 (Disaster Strikes)

It's been a while since I've been able to work on my cosplay stuff due to going to ALA last week, work stuff, and the horrid weather here in Seattle.  It's been snowing a bit here but I can't sit through the entire season without making any progress--so I'm taking baby steps.

Last I left off, I was working on the Spectre's shoes and I mentioned how well the pepakura model fit to some dress shoes I had laying around.  Well, I went and filled the gaps with some flexible expanding foam (great stuff by the way), let the foam cure, trimmed the excess, and went to try putting them on... which is when disaster strikes.  Apparently binding the pepakura model to the shoe and reinforcing them together made the "tongue" of the shoe completely rigid, meaning there's no way my foot would go in unless you were to slice an inch off the tops of my arches.  This isn't cool at all because they're starting to look cool, or I should rephrase, they're starting to look like something at least.  I tried shoehorning my foot in, but the rigid tongue / fiberglass combo was cutting into my foot.  I eventually pried hard enough and got my foot to squeeze in after cracking the pepakura model in several places.  I'll need to somehow repair the top bit and make it bigger without making the underlying shoe rigid--hopefully it's doable. 

I also spent some time focusing on smoothing out 1 of the legs (the better one) and I think that maybe it's nearly there (the other is hideous right now and will be worked on later).  It's feeling impossible getting the thing perfectly smooth and round and I feel like I might be wasting my time trying to do so.  So I'm hoping to get it a little better than how it's picture below and then prepping it for paint as I believe the painted finish is pretty much 90% of what determines the quality of a piece as a perfect prop with a mediocre paint job will look infinitely worse than a less-than-perfect prop with an outstanding paint job. 

  

That just leaves into question whether I have any painting skills... I dunno, lol.

Anime LA 2012 - 02

Here's the second and final installment to the ALA video series.  As I mentioned in the previous post, I didn't capture nearly enough footage as I should have so scene lengths are a bit longer than I'd like in this video.  I feel there's still some good stuff in there though.  Check it out below:

Anime LA 2012 - 01

This past weekend I attended Anime LA to do a little video work as it's been quite a long time since my last project.  I was only present for a couple days but still had a good time meeting some really cool people, checking out awesome cosplays, and discovering YouTube celebrities.  It was a pretty wild event to say the least, with people partying round-the-clock and lots of interesting sights around every turn.

I went to the event pretty ambitious with lots of ideas and goals and while I wasn't able to achieve most of them I tried to make the most of my time.  The convention was confined to a very small-area packed full of people with the general surroundings being somewhat unfit for extensive varied video work.  I wasn't able to shoot video with everyone I'd hoped and there were those that I wanted to shoot with but could not find them / they would disappear in an instant.  As a result, I didn't get much footage from the event which I'm regretful over.  I mostly seemed to shoot video of friends or friends of friends and a few people that were already being singled out by photographers.  My goal is to try and be more proactive in capturing more people.

I collected footage for at least 1 video, maybe 2 but that may be pushing it we'll see.  The embed is below: