Going into Year Two we certainly had a lot of things we wanted to do. If you had seen our project list… it was nuts.
Things didn’t go as planned. But there were a number of new things we were able to do in spite of that. Along with some successes we didn’t quite expect.
The Obstacles We Couldn’t Overcome
First, the whole COVID-19 thing. That pretty much fucked a lot of things up. And I’m sure everyone will understand that. Not much to say there. So I’d rather talk about the more personal pieces.
Luis overall has been fine. He’s now a senior developer for a support platform. At this point he can buy his own damn Whataburger.
Tacocat took on a pretty heavy college course load for the first half of the school year. Which did limit how much time she had to spend on cosplay. And a lot of that was put towards a huge passion project that she wanted to enter as competition pieces. Which due to the level of complexity has yet to be completed.
Mermaid Child went through some less than stellar relationships. Along with a job where the management staff treated her as less than a human being.
I ended up losing two jobs due to program changes (they were both contract-to-hire or extension possible). As of this moment I’m still unemployed. To be transparent I’m typically the one who funds the studio time, set building, etc. With everyone else putting all of their resources into either making or purchasing costume/outfit pieces this makes for a good balancing act. Being able to do my part was much more difficult..
Allybelle lost one of her biggest supporters. Not just for cosplay but for life in general… her mother.
So yeah… we had to deal with a lot in the past year. It threw us all off. And we had to adapt.
The Moving Pieces
There was one way we really wanted to get ourselves out there in front of people: by doing panels/demos. Early last year one thing we decided upon to try to get our foot in the door was doing photography demonstrations. As near as we could tell no one else was doing such a thing. Based on a conversation I had with one of the organizers of Okashicon doing those with a highly interactive nature would probably get people interested.
And they did. Not only at Okashicon but also Ikkicon and Ushicon. But the thing that really got us was how people in the audience were asking really good questions. We did not expect how consistent that was across all the demos. It was probably our biggest “Wait… there’s something here” we’ve had in quite some time.
It was obvious that this sort of presentation was appreciated. So we hope we can do more of that in the future. We already have a number of other ideas for other panels both cosplay and photography related. Hopefully there will be further opportunities to get our knowledge out there.
Another unexpected bit for us was being asked to run a photo booth. That wasn’t in our plans at all for this year when we were asked we were like “Why not?” And attendees really liked how we did things in our own style. While we may not be quite down to do quite the same thing for a three or four day event, possibly doing the same at smaller gatherings could work well. And there is one that’s currently in the cards.
Outside of conventions and events we certainly did have other successes. Our work has been published in print three different times now. We are looking at some other avenues to get us out there. And in ways people would not quite expect. But they will totally be us through and through.
The Moving Forward
In the short term we’re going through a “pause” moment. Which is really because so much is out of our control right now as of this writing. Overall I think we’re all in a better headspace to tackle the projects we want to do. It’s just waiting for everything else to get out of the way so we CAN go do them. I mean it’s not like our project lists have gone anywhere during this time.
If there’s anything that’s probably one the greatest strengths of MTA is our flexibility. Since we’re not tied to any systems that expect things to be delivered on a regular basis it helps us a lot. Nor do we have a heavy reliance on events to get our name out there. So we’ve been afforded the ability to explore new opportunities. And sometimes just not do anything when needed.
When we created Make Them Awesome we wanted to not do what was expected of us. Based on the past year and what we’re predicting for the next few months going that route was easily the best choice we’ve made.
Once the obstacles have been cleared there is one thing you can expect: for us to be us.
