撮影会： 大神

Whoootwhooot!

*drumroll* Last Saturday we FINALLY had our long-awaited Ôkami shoot!!
Honestly, I've been starting to doubt that we'd ever manage to take some pictures with our whole group,
seeing we've been planning this shoot since November 2008 without much of a progress.
- Which is why I couldn't really believe we did it until I saw the first pictures online.








As I said before, it all started in 2008, when Feder, Krone and Herr Fuchs asked me to join their little Ôkami group for AniMaCo (read my report). Because the location looks pretty awful we didn't take many pictures at the con, but agreed to have a proper photo shoot next year (read: 2009).
Spring came and our group even found another addition when joined us with the Oki costume I'd sewn for her.
BUT. Unreliable weather forecasts, a serious lack of time managing skills and plain bad luck thwarted our plans! (It's really not that easy to get 5 cosplayers
and a photographer with very different scedules to be at the same place at a time. Really.) We were considering postponing the shoot to autumn (we insisted on either cherry blossoms or red leaves as a setting), but in the end decided on this spring.
On the good side, this gave us the opportunity to redo parts of our costumes and as we are now I think our group r0x0rs! XD
So we met on Saturday with Andy K. a.k.a. Squirrel-of-Doom, who is not only a extremely talented but also a very patient photographer.
Location was a big park near my house (Gärten der Welt). Luckily enough, there were two cherry trees that were still in bloom. And even more luckily (?) the weather wasn't exactly nice that day, so the park wasn't as crowded as it usually is.
The shoot itself was a lot of fun, as usual we were goofing around a lot. ('s costume-induced blindness definitely added to that XD)
It was the third time for me and to wear our costumes (see Animaco and MTV Game Awards report). We redid some minor parts (e.g. Rao's neclace, Oki's mask), but not much. I'm still not really happy with my Rao costume (what was I thinking when I chose that fugly shiny fabric?!? I know I didn't have much time nack then, but still...), especially next to Feder's
gayness
prettiness. I highly enjoyed being "busty babe" again, though XD Rao's revealing wardrobe isn't like anyhing I'd usually wear, so that was a nice change (Although I still prefer my boobies properly covered) XD


The "cast":

	Krone as Amaterasu
	Feder as Waka
	Herr Fuchs as Demon Merchant
	My sister Melli as Oki
	Myself as Rao

The pictures:

Colourful, pretty and GAY awesomeness by Squirrel of doom






Full gallery


Krone, our Amaterasu also took some kick-ass pictures (I heart you, you know that, right?)






Full gallery


I lovelovelove how all the pictures came out! ♥ ♥ ♥

Actually, I took a few pictures myself, too, but after seeing their amazing galleries I kind of lost the confidence to actually edit and upload them...


Oh, in case you haven't played Ôkami yet: DO IT!!! XD
(Really, it's one of the prettiest and funniest games I've ever played!)

イベントレポ：ＣＯＮＮＩＣＨＩ，コスサミ

This is an image-heavy report on three wonderful days in September ♥

This year was the first time I got to go to Connichi with my sister Melli, so I was reeeaaaally looking forward to it.
Her friend Sarah (whom we own 1000 favours for ... everything on that weekend) was also coming with us, which was great because we were pretty much freaking out about the World Cosplay Summit preliminaries in which we were going to enter, but she supported us a lot... and kept us sane XDD

Because Melli is pretty busy at work, I did most of the sewing... 4 costumes in two months. Not funny.
Melli helped me a lot, though. She was in charge of our props and she did all the things I hate about sewing: Cutting, hemming, trimming... XD
Still, the costumes and the preparations for our WCS skit kept us both pretty stressed. It wasn't until Friday morning (8 ours before we got on our train) that I finished the last hem on her Jomy costume @__@

	Friday Rao & Oki (Ôkami) Rao is a costume I sewed almost a year ago. Oki was done this March, but never worn to a convention. I still have a lot of regrets about Rao (colour, fabric ...), but at least I managed to redo her necklace. Oki was a pain in the ass because of all the patterns on his clothes, but I still like the outcome. My sister did his mask and his sword and I think they look wonderful. Hopefully we'll get to do a photo shoot with our full Ôkami group soon! Unfortunately, my sister forgot her bracers at the hotel and we didn't take any pictures together orz ↓1st picture by Zora-Warrior, 2nd picture taken by me on a photoshoot earlier this year
	Saturday Jomy Marquis Shin & Soldier Blue (Terra e) Pleather. I hate it. But oooh, how I love our capes ♥ Terra e is a wonderful yet terribly underrated series we watched last year. I instantly fell in love with the costume design and -ignoring our genetic crossplay incompatibility- decided that we would do this together. I knew that Melli'd have preferred to do Tony instead of Jomy, but I refused to sew a costume with a colour combination as hideous as his... It was my first time using pleather and it was... horrible. I couldn't find any golden or silver pleather, so I spraypainted the off-white pleather I had used for the waistcoats... Attaching the golden and silver ornaments to the vests took me ages to finish and I'm not really happy with the outcome, but they look quite okay on the pictures... Which reminds me of the tiny photo shoot we had with Maddi (Thank you!). Oh, the homolust XDD
	Sunday - WCS (o_O) Souseiseki & Suiseiseki (Rozen Maiden) These were our costumes for the German WCS preliminaries. I've been wanting to do Rozen Maiden ever since I first started cosplay, but I also wanted my sister to be Souseiseki (siblings cosplay FTW!). So when we decided to enter WCS, it was an easy choice. I always thought these costumes would be fairly easy to sew... but I was WRONG. The vests and Suiseiseki's sleeves gave a hard time, but apart from Souseiseki's cape I'm really pleased with the outcome. ↓1st and 2nd picture taken by Krone on a photo shoot this week (full coverage will follow), 3rd picture taken by Kai Wernze

When we saw the competition at WCS we were quite demotivated, all of these costumes were made of pure win!! They all had wings, LEDs, huge dresses, lots of detail... Yet, (for some reason we still need to figure out) we actually won 3rd place. WOOT!
It seems like there were a lot of people who really enjoyed our skit, which is almost embarrassing, because a lot of things actually went terribly wrong on Sunday... For instance: One of the ballons we needed for our skit (filled with helium) flew away o__O So we had to improvise. Luckily, our hotel provided us with some small ballons... And ... well... just watch it yourselves:
(Nevermind the first 30 seconds, we had some preparations to do first XD)




10000000x thanks to Rinoa for uploading this!!

AAAnd because some things might have gone lost on the small Youtube screen have some EPIC stage-photo-summary:






Yes, plot... What plot? XDD Plots are overrated >_>
Anyways, we were reaaallly surprised (if not shocked) when they announced our names! We had to be backstage the whole time so we didn't get to watch any of the other groups' skits, but costume-wise most of them were... epic!! *___*
Congratulations to Brigitte and Desiree, who won the competition with their heart-warming Kamikaze Kaitô Jeanne performance! ♥

To sum up my Connichi 2009 experience:

+ cosplaying with my sister ♥ ♥
+ meeting Anni, Kumo, Soffel & Maddi ♥
+ 3rd place!!!!11oneeleven!
+ awesome cosplays *_*
+ drama-free WCS (I think?)
+ nice weather

- crowded
- pricey dealer's room
- people leaving their garbage behind at the park
- no Eva and Pü ....
- hardly took any pictures

ママ!! 私、テレビに出たよ!!

"Mommy! I was on TV!" XD

I'm so tired. Beware of crappy English!

As I said in my last entry I was invited to the MTV Game Awards on Nov. 20th this year as a cosplayer.
I don't know about other countries, but this was the first game award show in Germany evar. Apparently the video game shows on MTV (Germany) have become quite popular lately so they decided to do an award show just like the MTV movie and music awards. So for this show they recruited cosplayers who were supposed to act as both audience and claqueurs.


When I got the message from MTV asking me to come I didn't really need to consider it. I mean... Games? MTV? Simon and Budi (hosts of "GameOne", a TV show on German MTV)? For free? Hell, yeah!


Since they asked me to invite some more of my cosplay friends, I dragged Anni, Cari and some more people along XD


THE RECORDING
I met up with Anni (who came all the way from Kiel) right after uni ended (about 2 p.m.), then we put on our cosplay makeup ("Panda to the rescue!!") and went to the studio/hall where everything took place.
This is what we looked like when we arrived at the dressing room at 3:30p.m.:


We were pretty much the last ones to arrive, everyone else was already chatting. We were cosplayers 15 alltogether, much less than I had expected but thanks to that I got to know everyone personally. ♥
We also finally met Janina, who was in charge of us and told us the following procedures:
Rehearsal starting at 5 p.m.
Changing from 7p.m.~8:30 p.m.
9 p.m.: Start
During the rehearsal we still wore our normal clothes, but we noticed it would get quite hot because of all the lights...
I was still soooo optimistic back then... XD
Anyways, because we weren't allowed to take pictures during the actual recording, the rehearsal was our only chance to get some photos. As MTV tried very hard to do a show for both gamers and "normal" people, there were also some non-game related things like music acts:


Left: Polarkreis 18 (#1 in Germany atm), right: Sido (a rapper who apparently wasn't really happy to be there)
The other thing that wasn't related to games even in the slightest... were the hosts! It was clear to see that they have never laid a single finger on a game pad before and they just seemed so totally unmotivated and wrong.


Joko and Hadnet, the hosts. They wore several costumes during the show. I feel utter sympathy for the poor seamstress that had to sew 6 costumes in 1 1/2 weeks...

In case you're wondering what the hall looked like and where we were standing:

On the left side you can see one of the two stages. We were standing right above there (where you can see the children on this picture).


Anni was standing right next to me. Waving for the cameras. She knows good fanservice! XD

After the rehearsal we headed back to the changing room. Luckily I don't need much time to put on my Rao costume, so I could enjoy the buffet first. They had cold and warm dishes, both very yummy~

Then we changed into our costumes and chatted with Janina.

Me and Janina. She was so cute ♥ She really cared about us (;o;)

Next... was the show. Nervous? No. ｶﾞﾀｶﾞﾀ(((;OдOll)))ｶﾞﾀｶﾞﾀ
Well, the actual recording was nothing new to us, since we already knew everything from the rehearsal. BUT this time there was an audience below us (which made me regret wearing a mini skirt), watching uns, taking photos, pointing at us.
It was akward, but... quite fun actually, being in the limelight for some minutes XD


This photo was taken by Janina shortly before the recording started. Gosh, I'm such a camhore XD

During the show it was getting hotter and hotter and it was propably only thanks to Janina who supplied us with water that no one fainted. Himbeerpudding (who was standing second next to me) wore a black leather coat and I can only imagine how she must've felt. She was my hero of the night for bearing the heat!!

Luckily, the show only lasted 1 1/2 hours and we all were glad when we could finally escape into the cold and fresh air backstage.
Unluckily, due to the extreme temperatures I started feeling reeeaaally unwell... If it wasn't for Anni, who would be staying at my place, I would have returned home immediatley. But she has been looking forward to the after-show party ever since I invited her, so I just could not possibly ask her to go home with me. Plus, I wanted to meet some people at the after-show party, as well... I ended up going to the party... and I owe my deepest gratitude to Anni for persuading me, because: *drummroll*


*insert fanqirly squee here* I got my picture with Budi!!!oneone!!11!! He and Simon are so funny and nice... and I was like the stupidest fangirl EVAR *headdesk*

Retropectively it was a fun night. I feel deeply honored to have shared the stage with awesome people.

Here you can see all cosplayers who took part. Sorry for the crappiness of this collage, but I just had to XD
You guys rock, I hope I'll see you again some time!!


ON AIR
The show aired first on Friday 21st and had about 3 or 4 reruns during the last week. I guess most Germans on my FL watched it (?).
If you didn't: You didn't miss anything. The show was quite fun when you were there in person, but that's propably only thanks to the people who were with me. On TV it was just plain boring. My sister watched it for some minutes and then switched the channel because she couldn't stand it XD

Well, it was the first show of its kind, so I guess it'll be better next year. Getting Simon and Budi as hosts will be a big improvement. And maybe laudators who care to pronounce the name of the game producers correctly...

As for us cosplayers it was really dissappointing to see that we had barely any screen time at all. I mean, FFVII CC won an award (best handheld game) , why wouldn't they show Mystery-Zelda (Zack) and Videros (Sepiroth)? Their costumes were absolutely stunning! I really don't know anymore why they wanted us to be there in the first place... One of the few people who actually seemed to acknowledge the pain we went through for this (standing the heat that is XD), was Lucien Kings (development manager for GTA 4), who prompted some applause for us in his acceptance speech XD

This is what it looked like on TV↓ (photographed from screen hence the poor quality)


Here you can see us standing on the galleries on both sides of the main stage.


My 1 second of fame. YAY XD


RANDOM
Anni stayed at my place for the weekend. I felt like commenting on that as well, so I spent like 1000hours in PS and here's the result:

Dedicated to Anni XD
Faces edited for your safety.  And for mine. Anni would kill me.


Note: Most of the pictures in this entry were taken by Vinny-Vieh and Anni. Thanks for providing me with pictures!!