POMPAY COSPLAY www.facebook.com/POMPAYCOSPLAY Hi Jessica, how did you get into Cosplay and when? I have always connected with the arts. Because of this I was always enrolled in my school’s art classes. It was in my junior high art class that I had a friend ask me to help them sew a kimono for a ‘cosplay’ they were doing for a cosplay contest. I didn’t know what cosplay was but I wanted to help my friend with this project. Of course, I had no sewing knowledge what so ever. The kimono was held together with safety pins. She told me that the cosplay contest was held at a local anime convention. Luckily she won a prize and everyone was happy. This got me thinking about attending this local convention. It was called ‘Otafest’. This was over 10 years ago. My first convention ever was in 2003 at Otafest. I was inspired by how engaged people were with characters; crafting to create exact replicas of their appearance and even acting the same way as the character. This was a celebration of fandom, and I loved it. The first time I cosplayed was in 2004. I cosplayed Black Rose from .Hack. Who is your favourite character to cosplay? My favourite character to cosplay would have to be Neytiri from Avatar. She was such an inspiration to me
when I saw the movie. The character design was phenominal and I knew right away this was what I wanted to cosplay. The best part of this cosplay was wearing it at another local convention called “The Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo”. The look on people’s faces were so motivating and enlightening for me. I love making other people happy. To my surprise there were quite a few younger children who knew which character I was and they wanted a hug and picture with me! I couldn’t have been more happy. What influences you most, tv, movies, games or any other characters? The major influences in my life are character design. I fall in love with how a character looks before I engage with a character’s personality. I’ve always been drawn to visual stimuli in every medium, including television shows, movies, books, video games, etc…To me, a character with strong visuals is a character to be remembered. Do you make all your own costumes or do you prefer to buy them? I have made the majority of my cosplays, but there are some where I did buy specific parts and alter them to fit the character. I honour both made
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and bought cosplays because to me cosplay is all about having fun. If you make a costume, how long does it take you to make and what goes into the preparation of the character? When I make a costume the first thing I need to do is study the character through google image search, blogs, fan art, or pre-exsisting cosplay. I look to see what elements need to be exaggerated, which should take priority, and which need more finetuning. Every part of the character matters to me. I also study their language and posing. This gives me a chance to see how I should model in front of a camera. Then I buy all the materials that I believe will work best. Sometime I need to buy different materials because things don’t always work the way we want them to. It’s all about experimentation and finding out how materials work. It’s okay to make mistakes!! I’ve made thousands of mistakes but I’ve learned so much from those experiences. The next step is to make the cosplay piece by piece. I always make sure that I order wigs first because they usually take the longest to get. Otherwise the whole process can take me anywhere from one week to three weeks. Cosplay & photography go together hand in hand, tell us abit