Ever go exploring what may seem like a small opportunity… and then it gets bigger than you imagined?
How We Got Here, or Well We Didn’t Expect THAT To Happen
One thing we’ve been looking at to get our name out there was trying to get vendor or artist tables at local events. We’ve only seen a small number of cosplayers attempt to go this route and certainly not any photographers. There’s the possibility of guesting which we have have done. But we don’t have any pretensions about how exactly we might be viewed at an event. If we can get into a spot where we can talk to people about cosplay, photography, and just being a creative person in general we’ll do it.
Back in early 2017 there was a local event that started up called Anime On Ice. This was pretty much a small nerd event held at Chaparral Ice here in Austin. It’s an ice rink that not only allows public ice skating but they also hold sporting events like hockey, broomball, and curling. Never thought I’d see such a thing at an ice rink… but hey… why the hell not?
With this first event a former member of MTA mentioned they were going… so I was like “Hey, I’ll tag along.” So I went as well.
It was a very interesting thing. I like it when people try to pull nerd culture into an aspect people wouldn’t think of… and it ends up being fun. And Anime On Ice certainly fit that.
The funny thing was that the person I went to hang out with entered the cosplay contest. And they ended up winning Best In Show. We certainly didn’t expect that.
So fast forward to October 2017 and another Anime On Ice was put together. This time around it was myself, Allybelle, and Tacocat...and Tacocat brought along her sister Mermaid Child (which was the first time I had ever met her). We mostly just hung out. But all three of them decided to enter the cosplay contest. Allybelle won Best In Craftsmanship for Snow Halation Eli Ayase while Tacocat and Mermaid Child got Best In Show for Mogyutto Honoka Kousaka and Kotori Minami.
I was greatly amused at how people I knew got those awards at back to back events.
At this point Anime On Ice went yearly… and we were at the 2018 event. Tacocat, Allybelle, and myself just hung out really. Just chatting with people we knew and having fun. No big deal. Plus we found a Japanese restaurant we all liked.
Anime On Ice 2019 starts coming up and I see the call for vendors, artists, and such. Given that AOI just runs for five hours on a Saturday, I figured it would be a good low key event to maybe try to get our name out there. I pitched this to the team and they were all “Yeah, go for it.”
So I’ll emailed the contact explaining what we do and how we’d like to see about getting a vendor table. Mostly to talk to people and sell prints/character charms.
None of us expected what would happen. But apparently we hit them up at the exact right time.
The organizer of the event replied back and said that the photographer they usually have run their cosplay photo booth was not going to be able to make it this year. And they asked if we would be interested in doing it.
Since this was a smaller event… why the Hell not?
I will admit I laughed my ass off when I got that email though.
The Setup, or We’re Going To Do Things Differently
OK, I’m going to be candid here. I’ve not been the biggest fan of cosplay photo booths. Or at least in the instances where I’ve encountered them at cons here in Texas.
For one with the attendee counts at large events if people are flocking to your booth for free photos that doesn’t give you very much time to get to know those in front of the camera, bounce some ideas around based on the characters, etc.
Secondly the lighting setup never changes. Typically I’ll either see one light with a really large modifier. Or two lights evenly spaced away from the subject set for the same power. So there’s no attempt to use light to create drama and add some depth to the photo. I mean this works for things like school photos or corporate headshots. But with people sometimes putting in so much energy into their costumes I feel like flat lighting in some ways take away from the character the person is trying to represent.
Third (and this is honestly my biggest complaint), almost everyone uses either white seamless paper or white muslins for their backgrounds. The problem with this is if someone has a costume or wig that is primarily white or even if the person is rather pale then all the detail gets lost. Especially if someone ends up getting placed a bit closer to a light source. This has actually happened to some members of our team. On top of that the subjects usually end up looking like they were cut out of another photo and pasted on.
I’m not sure why these setups are defaulted to. I had actually brought this up in a forum I frequent and one thing that was mentioned was that it would be easier to add backgrounds and CG this way, Which is possible. But I’m never seeing that happen. And if so many people are doing the same thing how can anyone else tell these people apart?
So yeah… we weren’t going to do any of that.
For this I knew I wanted to use a gray background. That way I knew I could certainly get some separation of my subject. For my demos at Okashicon I did order a 10’ x 12’ gray background from Neweer. But it was honestly a bit too light in color for my liking. Also they had recently changed from an all cotton muslin material to a synthetic mix. So it was also too shiny. Thankfully Prime Backdrops was still making theirs out of cotton. I ordered one and then picked up some bottles of Rit Dye in Charcoal Gray. The dye job came out perfect.
The next step was to not only make sure I had different modifiers on hand but to also bring some color gel packs. Because this was a smaller event I figured I’d have some space to take a few more minutes with someone if an idea came up. Lighting wise I had planned on bringing my Godox AD200 along with the Godox QS400II as well as some various Yongnuo YN-560s. For modifiers my go-to’s would be the five foot Wescott umbrellas. But I would also bring the 11” x 60” Interfit strip box and Phottix Raja 60 cm x 30 cm soft box in case I wanted more control of light on the subject. I’d also have a 7” reflector with a 40 degree honeycomb grid available. And CineFoil. Never go to a shoot without CineFoil.
For a bit there initially we did not know where exactly we’d be shooting at. Last year the booth was set in an alcove by the rink near two locker rooms. It’s not exactly super bright in there so with this setup it was certainly workable.
Then we found out the booth would be set in one of the locker rooms and our vending table would be in the alcove with the other guests.
Okay… if we have more control over the space we’re shooting in… what can we do?
The first thing that came to mind was light painting. If we can turn the lights on and off at will, why not bring some of our light painting toys for the ride? And with that… why not tote along the smoke/fog machines as well?
If we can take as many steps possible to make this our own… then we’re going to do it.
The Event, or People Really Liked Gels And Fog
Because we had attended Anime On Ice before we had mostly a pretty good understanding of the space we would be working in. There were still a couple of unanswered questions but we thought we could just figure them out when we got there.
Our main question was going to be around power. I knew my tethering laptop was not going to last the whole event plus with the QS400 I needed electricity for it along with the fog machines. The room we were originally in did not have outlets so we ended up switching rooms. Plus the rooms did not have their own individual light controls. In order to turn the lights on and off for those rooms the owners would have to turn off the lights for that half of the whole arena. Given the age of the building we weren’t terribly surprised. It did mean the light painting gear would have to stay in the truck. And in hindsight it was probably best.
I did have a super failing on my part though.
Somehow I left my background stand at home.
Thankfully Precision Camera was right across the street. So I went over there and purchased another set. Ten minutes before they closed. I had planned on buying another one for some upcoming things. I just didn’t think it would be needed so quickly.
We did some test shots with Tacocat as Sabrina to make sure initial setups made sense. And they worked. So we were good to go.
At one point Tacocat had mentioned something about her going out to try to entice people to come take photos with us. The wonderful Princess Shae came in to do some shots with us closer to the beginning of the event. Outside of that the first couple of hours were kinda quiet. So I had Tacocat go out to try to pull people in. She went and talked to our friend Lorelei from Colony Drop Cosplay who was helping with the cosplay contest and asked her to try to get people to our booth.
After the contest… things started GOING.
The one bit I didn’t quite expect: just how many ‘got’ what we were going for with this whole idea. With the use of light modifiers, interesting placement, colored gels, smoke/fog… and the fact that everyone could see the shots in real time on the laptop helped communicate what we were aiming for. Yeah posing and expression may not be perfect but I think a lot of them understood what was possible.
The characters we had come through really helped with coming up with ideas. We had damned near a full Sailor Scout group. We had a Yuri and Victor from Yuri On Ice. A smartly dressed Deku and Todoroki from My Hero Academia. Another guest Crystalhardted was there as Elsa from Frozen. And there were a few others who really worked well towards allowing us to explore things.
Some things weren’t perfect. My muslin ended up with wrinkles in it even though I had steamed and thought I had folded it well enough the day before (and I didn’t have our steamer with us). It also would have helped to use something a bit wider as some ideas wouldn’t come out without a ton of time in post. Though with the space we were in, I'm not sure if that would have been possible. Speaking of space, there were moments where I couldn’t get back far enough for full length shots of some people. Feet ended up getting clipped off in images for some. So I couldn’t use those.
Editing, or Making Things Even More Unique
One thing I did not expect was that I would have to apply a bunch of different editing styles. As I was going through everything I was like “Wait, I can’t apply the same style to everyone”. It just wouldn’t look right. In a way I had to treat each set of characters as a mini photo shoot. Each set has its own look.
To be honest I was mildly surprised at reaching that conclusion. A lot of it really came down to what methods I’d use for contrast adjustment and how to apply saturation (and sometimes I didn’t at all). Typically when I work on one of our sets a certain style will start to come to mind. I’ll apply it to a few different images to see if it makes sense. And if it does I’ll use it on all the images with a bit of tweaking where needed. But that wouldn’t work here.
Ultimately that was for the better.
I think in the end realizing that and taking those steps would speak to why we even did the whole thing in the first place.
Final Thoughts, or Did We Achieve What We Wanted?
Overall, I have to say yes. We really wanted to see if we could be successful in doing a cosplay photo booth while applying our style of Plus Extra. And we did.
It was great to see how many people quickly understood what we were trying to do even though they had no idea who the Hell we were. Talking through the process with everyone helped quite a bit with that I think. Explaining what we were doing and why along with taking questions and feedback from them made them feel like they were a part of the team. And at one point Tacocat started playing the part of Wig Mom to help people look even better for shots.
All of that and being able to see image results as we were shooting in real time got people excited and really into things. There was one comment I happened to overhear while we were working:
“I have never seen cosplay photos like this before.”
That’s why we do what we do.
Would we do this again for Anime On Ice? Oh yeah… hopefully they’ll have us back again next year.
Would we do this for other events? Eh, it would depend to be honest. If a given con/festival would have enough space for us to work the way we want to that would help. But really it would come down to the length and size. Like a one day thing could be doable. But say a three or four day commitment? Probably not, or at least not in this same format. Since I would like to do demos and panels to help educate people being tied to just shooting in a cosplay photo booth for the length of the con may not help speak to that. I have some ideas here to be able to mix the two. I’m just not sure if we could get buy in from possible events especially when we take the current understanding of cosplay photo booths into account.
We had a lot of fun at Anime On Ice and ended up learning some things. To get the kinds of reactions we did from attendees certainly made it worthwhile.
Still need to get Luis to penguin slide across the ice though.
