About Us

You may be wondering why we have been so quiet. As of the time that I'm writing this, Jehn and I do not have any active cosplay or convention plans together.. and that's okay! Maybe in the future that will change, but until then!!~ If you'd like to follow my solo adventures-- I have my own website (https://www.kiyanocturne.com/) and am most active on twitter and instagram. https://twitter.com/KiyaNocturne https://www.instagram.com/kiyanocturne/

Fuu: Jehn [SEC-C cosplay] Hikaru: Jinxie cosplay Umi: Kiya [SEC-C cosplay]

In order to explain the whole story about our Soul Calibur skit, there’s a little bit of background on how we started doing skits in general as, in many ways, our skit career has been both a complete whirlwind and a long, long drawn out journey.

ONI-CON 2012 Our goal was to prepare for the World Cosplay Summit and we didn’t want that experience to be our Very First Skit, so Sofia and I dove into the skit world first in 2012 with an xxxHolic Maru and Moro dance skit. Dancing really isn’t our forte… but then again, we gave ourselves all of two rehearsals and about one month to make the costumes and skit concept.

Photo courtesy of Angelwing

ANIME MATSURI 2013 Next we wanted to do a Gankutsuou skit for Anime Matsuri later that con season. Since we already had an idea forming when WCS came to AM, we decided to go for it since we were preparing a skit already.

On the technical side of things, cosplay is a lot like teaching to me: if you’re not learning and improving, you’re not doing your job correctly. During the Gankutsuou alone, we learned how we worked together as a team to put together a script and block out our ideas; we learned how each other works in rehearsal and how much time it would take us to put together a polished performance; we learned new techniques in sewing; and we learned that a four hour distance was actually a lot bigger of a deal than it seemed.

Photo courtesy of Angelwing

Wisely, we chose to take a break after AM because lastly – we learned just how much you have to pour into your WCS performance and craftsmanship. WCS is an all or nothing competition, so our next idea had to (in our minds) be the one to win with.

SUMMER 2013 Slowly but surely, we started working on our skit concept and script. The idea was fairly simple given that Pyrrha and Tira have one storyline from Soul Calibur V. We reached out to those among the WCS community that could give us some feedback and started collecting materials to make the costumes. In addition to this preparation, we decided to do the San Japan cosplay contest with costumes that required a great deal of time and energy in craftsmanship.

Photo courtesy of Photo Persuasion

Once San Japan was over, we were excited to really get started on Pyrrha and Tira.

CON SEASON 2014 We bowed out of competing in anything (which included skipping the WCS rounds of 2014) for a few reasons: we knew how long it would take to have costumes and a performance that we felt were up to par for WCS, I had quite a few big life changes happening (new job, getting married, and buying a house all in one year ;p), and we were invited to several conventions to be guests/judges.

We watched the WCS 2014 Qualifiers and Finals to cheer on all the teams and, much to our chagrin, we were late to the Soul Calibur party. For the 2015 rounds, a rule had passed that teams could not use/copy material too closely related to previously competing teams, so when we asked about this predicament, WCS rejected our application.

With a year’s worth of work under our belt, not being able to use our idea and not being able to enter WCS was a huge blow – I packed away my materials and progress on Pyrrha, not working on the costume for months.

ANIME MATSURI 2015 After my wedding and honeymoon were over, Sofia and I sat down and tried to pull ourselves out of our crafting funk. We decided we needed to go through with the costumes and skit and that our next goal would be to perform at Anime Matsuri. We reworked the skit to suit the AM stage, including enlisting the help of an awesome voice actor (Kailey Peak!) to bring dialogue into the performance. Performing at AM (located in my home town) also meant we had easy access to stage ninjas as my husband, sister, and brother-in-law were happy to help.

We’ve always had a love/hate relationship with AM… we really like the convention, location, and contest, but just can’t seem to get the timing right.

In both our cases, work becomes extremely busy starting in January and lasting until the end of April. I made Fuu in a crunch for AM 2012 (I got to the point where my dad took the paint brush out of my hand because I was so grumpy), we entered Hades and Athena for AM 2013 in a crunch (we spent Friday before the con rigging Sofia’s massive wings to a harness), and the WCS Qualifiers hosted at AM 2013 was yet again in a crunch (we were literally finishing some iron-on designs the minute before we had to leave my apartment to go be pre-judged at the hotel).

Paying heed that in the past we needed ample time, Sofia and I made sure to plan specific weekends for our practice, switching between going to Dallas and Houston. When it came down to the wire, Sofia drove to Houston the week before the convention for us to cram as much skit practice and crafting in as possible.

We could have gone on stage with rushed craftsmanship and extremely incomplete costumes, but on Wednesday before the convention, we knew we couldn’t finish to our liking and wouldn’t be happy if we tried. We decided to drop out of the contest; AM just wasn’t in the cards for us this time.

PREPARING FOR ANIME EXPO 2015 Once more into the breech, dear friends…

Anime Expo was next on our list of conventions to go to, so it was an easy decision to give ourselves another three months to finish our costumes, rework the skit again, and perform there. The not so easy part of AX was that this was the third go-around of our skit and we were still working on the costumes.

AX has a time limit of two minutes, whereas AM’s limit was two and a half minutes, so we had to make some adjustments to the audio and choreography. The first time I went to Dallas to rehearse was disastrous – we loved our first skit and then we loved our second skit. It felt a little like beating a dead horse. Crafting-wise, I was ready to move on and start other things; I was burned out on Pyrrha. At this point though, we had spent so much time, money, effort, and emotion creating these costumes and performance that we kept going.

On my part, once summer vacation hit I knew I would have time to finish Pyrrha, so June was spent nearly 24/7 getting the costume done. Life didn’t make it easy on Sofia as she moved two weeks before we had to get on a plane to go to California. She called me before she was supposed to come to Houston for a final rehearsal and said she needed the time to craft instead, which meant the changes made to the audio and choreography were going to have to be practiced when we were together in California. This was a little nerve-wracking, but by this point it was more important that the crafting was done.

I had a lot of help in the final days leading up to the flight: my sister and mother came over to make our set, my father came a separate day to cut the set to size for travel and make a stand for the sword, my brother-in-law who paints figurines came over to help me with the sword and shield’s paint job, and last but not least, my husband kept me fed and sane. I ended up with a few things to hand-sew and the progress book to finish in the hotel room.

AT ANIME EXPO 2015 The original plan was to divide the work – Sofia: Tira’s costume, Tira’s ringblade, and Pyrrha Omega’s monster arm with armor; Jen: Pyrrha Omega’s costume, Soul Edge sword and shield, and Pyrrha’s tear-away costume. The time it took to create the malfested arm was much longer than either of us had anticipated, so there were quite a few details we were putting together on Wednesday and Thursday before the convention started. Back in Texas, I Like Donuts was finishing Tira’s ringblade and shipped it so it would arrive in time for the performance.

We got through the crunch (!) and made it to pre-judging in costume on time Friday morning. 

The pre-judging was running a little behind and the longer we sat there, the more we started to notice how things didn’t quite work with the entire costume on; for example, both of our boots/leggings started falling down. It was just little things that you only know when you finally put on the full costume, so we made a few mental notes about what to fix when we got back to the hotel for the contest the next day.

When we were actually in front of the judges, I had a moment of panic and skipped a ton of details on my costume. Our book showed and explained them, and these were professionals so I figured they would see the details, however I was pretty disappointed in myself that I didn’t represent my costume better. After pre-judging we had a photoshoot; this was such a fantastic experience that I felt way better immediately afterward.

Photo courtesy of GQBravo

We only planned on wearing one more costume, which was our American Bomber Girls from Happiness Charge! Pretty Cure at the PreCure Army meet-up. Friday evening was spent at the gathering and by Friday night we were exhausted. Instead of practicing, we chose to recharge by actually getting a full night’s sleep.

The masquerade has a pre-meeting in the morning the day of the contest, which I thought was fantastic. It allowed us to practice in the morning, get all of the information we needed, see the con a little bit, and then get right back to practicing. Our fabulous stage ninja Heidi (Sado Cosplay) came to meet us in our little area we found in the hotel to practice what she needed to do, and then it was time to get into costume yet again. We fixed the minor things that needed work and got into costume as much as possible before loading onto the shuttle bus with our set and our other costume pieces in tow.

Sofia has basically become a master at putting on make-up in a moving vehicle, and then she stuffed me into three out of my six layers when we arrived at the con. For better or worse, we needed to be pre-judged again because of a miscalculation – AX has a tabulation system and the difference between being judged by only three judges versus four judges would have given those judged by only three an advantage. I got a second chance, felt a million times more confident, and both Sofia and I walked away feeling successful this time.

Unfortunately, it took a lot of time to wait in line to be pre-judged again, for the pre-judging itself, and to get a chance to walk the stage so we knew where to set everything up. The backstage of any auditorium is typically dark, so putting together our set was fairly difficult and I was starting to get nervous. My dad had spray-painted the connecting pieces coordinating colors, but with each set piece broken down into 7-8 separate pipes, roughly 30 pieces all together, we were struggling with a giant puzzle. In the midst of this escapade, two of my detail pieces (one on my shoe, one on the malfested arm) of course decided to malfunction. It took Heidi, Sofia, and I so long to put the set together and fix the pieces that we didn’t have time to do a full costume run through. We also hadn’t practiced Heidi ripping the tear-away off of me, so we quickly went to the bathroom, snapped me in, ripped it partially away so we had an idea of how to do it, and then put me back together.

I consider myself pretty even-keel when it comes to stressful situations, but this was a stressful situation two years in the making – this was it, and if it didn’t happen now, it wasn’t going to happen ever. As I sat back down next to Sofia while we waited for our turn to perform, I started to calm down; our set was together and my two costumes were on, we knew the characters like the back of our hands, it would be okay.

Photo courtesy of CosPix

Naturally, as we went on stage, Sofia’s belt and its accessories came undone and then the set came apart at one joint and nearly fell down. The audience was pretty awesome, we got everything between “JUST… DO IT!” to applause and finally were ready to start the skit.

We had a few mishaps as we performed, but nothing too crazy. I think I blacked out a little bit I was on such autopilot with the movements. At the end when Pyrrha Omega goes for the finishing move on Tira, Sofia gets knocked down and I stab her side with Soul Edge; as this happened, Sofia actually got knocked down and her wig and two wig caps went flying.

Photo courtesy of CosPix

I think we were both a little shaken by the few things that didn’t go as planned, but we needed to do an interview and a photo pretty much immediately after we got off stage. Heidi gave Sofia the wig cap right off of her head, and took care of all the miscellaneous items we had while we tried to act like we were happy with our performance. We already are pretty critical of ourselves, and in that moment when things didn’t go perfectly, I think we were both at a point of “… well that happened.”

We watched the rest of the masquerade, thinking we would be thankful for any small recognition the judges bestowed upon our lowly selves and mulling over what happened. Two years of this skit and these costumes and we were left a little in limbo: glad it was done but not 100% satisfied.

AX pulls the winners earlier than they’re announced so they can be ready to get up on stage. It’s a double-edged sword: the excitement of knowing the second the judges call your name is gone, but there is efficiency in not having to wait for contestants to gather themselves, get up to the stage, and receive the award. As we sat there expecting to win nothing, I could have sworn I heard the den moms calling for SEC-C Cosplay. I told Sofia this, and she said that she didn’t want to get our hopes up and get excited; I agreed this was best and we continued to watch the awards. (We were in the front row, so we figured they would find us pretty easily if it was supposed to be us.)

When the den moms found us, I couldn’t contain my excitement. We went up on stage to receive First Runner-Up in the Master’s Category, but as we left a masquerade volunteer asked who we were and instructed us to turn right back around to also receive Second Runner-Up Best in Show. We interviewed a few more times, basically in a shell-shocked state, and then packed up to head back to the hotel.

Photo courtesy of Sado Cosplays

The next morning, AX masquerade has a “post-mortem” meeting to receive feedback. The entire contest was very well organized, well managed, and the volunteers heard both the good and the bad with open minds.

AFTERMATH The biggest reward was all of the support we received when we posted about our successes and upon returning home. Many of our friends knew how long this journey had taken us and were just as thrilled as we were that the costumes and skit had come together.

Aside from a brief stint in 2002, I’ve been watching and competing in Cosplay Contests/Masquerades for the past 4 years with a few notable awards under my belt. I love competing because it’s a chance to perform, a chance to show off and talk about my work, and a chance to meet others who are equally as passionate.

Recently, I had the chance to sit on the other side of the table as a Cosplay Judge and it really helped me realize how being able to speak about your work and present your costume in a positive light can affect the chance of receiving an award. The process can be nerve wracking for both veterans as well as new cosplayers so in this post, I’m going to talk you through pre-judging for Cosplay Contests/Masquerades. JUDGES Before we go any further, lets talk about your Judges. Depending on the contest, This can range from cosplayers and skilled craftsman to sometimes even celebrities. There are multiple judges, with usually varying skillsets and expertise. These individuals are there to do the thankless and stressful job of judging tons of awesome costumes and performances. There are only so many awards to go around.. and it’s inevitable that some great costumes and/or performances won’t place. Another thing to remember is that cosplay contests are, in large part, subjective. What the judges look for or are impressed by varies depending on the judge

PRE-JUDGING When I say pre-judging, I basically mean the time set aside for you to speak with the cosplay judges about your costume. Most masquerades will have this in some capacity.. be it during a pre-meeting before the contest or as an assigned appointment. Typically you only get a few minutes to talk about your work. Yes, I actually mean a few minutes.. 3-5 minutes max. How can you possibly explain 6 months of work in 3 minutes?! Well. The short answer is to prioritize. The long answer? Keep reading. PRESENTING YOUR WORK The judges see somewhere between 30-100 cosplayers throughout the day. While most judges can pick out techniques and will notice nice seams and good work, it’s unreasonable to expect them to pick up on every tiny detail in your costume. Even more unreasonable to expect that your fellow competitors won’t also have nice seams and good work.

It’s the cosplayers job to present their work. Make it easy on your judges to differentiate you from the rest.Tell them flat out what is most impressive about your costume and why.

You want to talk about positive points. If you must mention a mistake, talk about how you overcame that mistake. This is about confidence.. confidence in your costume and your skills. The judges don’t want to hear you put yourself down. This stuff isn’t easy, and none of us are perfect.. you are allowed to be proud of your work, even if it didn’t come out to your expectations. Be positive. Be proud. They will notice.

Before every pre-judging my partner and I talk about what we are going to say to the judges. We pick out what is most impressive about our costumes as well as things that we think the judges will look for (finishing techniques, materials, hidden details etc.) When we speak with the judges, we start from the top (wig) and work our way down, briefly describing each item and putting emphasis on the impressive parts of the costume. Prioritize what you tell the judges because many times you’ll have under 5 minutes of their time. Think of it like preparing a mini speech.  Numbers are nice when you have them; saying “Over 40 yards of ruffles were used on the entire costume” is much more impressive than saying “There’s alot of ruffles on my costume.”

When you are competing in a group, its even more important to talk about what you each will say during pre-judging. This is especially helpful when you used similar techniques. Saying “We are all fully lined using custom patterns” saves some time, rather than you all having to explain it separately. This also keeps each of you from tripping on each others words or overwhelming the judge with too much unorganized information.

Sometimes you’ll have a judge who wants to ask you questions rather than hear you talk.. that’s good.. but you still need to be able to talk about your work to answer their questions! Thinking about what you’ll say in this context isn’t a bad idea either! REFERENCES/ PROGRESS BOOKS Many Contests/Masquerades will request you bring a reference image. Even if they don’t, it’s still a good idea to do so. No judge has seen every anime or played every video game. They can’t judge the accuracy of your costume without clear images of the source materials. Having multiple reference images will be to your advantage.

In addition to reference images, some contests/masquerades will suggest (sometimes request) that you bring progress images and/or a progress book. Not only does it document all the work that went into the costume, but also helps the judges remember your costumes during deliberation.

You want the book to include images narrating how you made your costume. Descriptions are ok, but keep them brief.. It takes longer to read a lengthy description than it does to understand a series of pictures. Similarly, don’t feel like you need to include every picture you took. Unless it is necessary to your explanation or process, avoid having too many images of the same thing (ex. 5 images of sewing wefts into your wig.)

Think of the book as part of your pre-judging. You’ll be explaining your costume details in person, but the book is there so the judges have visuals and materials to refer back to before they make their decision. Personally, we like to keep the book between 10-20 (sometimes more for complicated costumes) for the both of us.. having one page per item and multiple images per page with a short description. I’ve seen others with a photo album or binder of pictures. There is no wrong way to go about it. YOUR ATTITUDE Pre-judging is almost like a job interview. Make the best impression by going in with a positive and humble attitude. If you go in with a defensive attitude or if you are dismissive of questions asked to you by the judges, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice. The judges want to know about your costume so they can make an informed decision during deliberation.