Road to Singapore and Cosfest VIII (2009) Part 1
We've been planning the trip to Singapore for many months now. I have often told my friend Sese that I wanted to be able to experience a convention outside the country as I have often found conventions and events here to be disappointing. Often our local events focus more on ticket prices and sponsorships than actually creating an event that would really cater to their audience.
We finally decided to attend Cosfest VIII (2009). Cosfest is Singapore's largest cosplay event held every year in July. It also hosts the Regional Qualifiers for the World Cosplay Summit held in Nagoya, Japan. There have been attempts to hold regional qualifiers for the Philippines, but as we have not been recognized as a participating country, we can't really send our own delegation.
The original plan was really just to attend the event. But we thought, why not have someone from our group join the cosplay competition and see what it is like to compete in a foreign country. Now our group has cosplayed here and there but none have really joined a competition so we weren't really sure who was up for it. After some thought, we decided that our very own Ice Artificio would be perfect.
Now that we knew who would be going, we had to decide what character to portray. We couldn't choose just any character. We needed a character that would represent the group and something that will make people say "WOW" if we did it. After much debate, we chose Talim from Soul Calibur IV. We thought what perfect way to represent the Philippines is with a Filipino character.
Now, Ice is relatively new to the cosplay scene. She has been in a number of private photoshoots and she has been a maid for Victorian Valentine 2008 and 2009 but this would be her first time to join a cosplay competition. We were afraid that she may not be ready for this endeavor but she herself assured us that this was something she wanted to do and was willing to go through this challenge.
The next step was to have the costume and the props for Talim done. Talim from Soul Calibur IV is not one of the easiest costumes to do. If you haven't noticed, Talim has a lot of skin on her costume. In fact the lower half of her costume is almost just skin. We also had to contend with the amount of detail that had to go into her costume. We wanted to get as close as we could to the details while staying in budget. For the costume, our seamstress in Marikina, Madam Belen took on the daunting challenge of working on the costume and the details. We had an especially hard time on the pants, as a lot of threadwork was needed and on a material that's not really that thread-friendly.
For the rest of the costume, we had our team of creative design experts Ings, Vica, Tere to work on the weapons and the other accessories for the costume. Ings Isungga & Vica worked with the weapons using rubber foam and PVC while Tere worked on the sandals. Those sandals were epic, I have to say. They also worked on her buckle and her necklace as well.
In the mean time, Ice was practicing for her routine that she would do on stage at Cosfest. Ings provided her a some sample tonfas to work with while they were finishing up with the props so that she could get used to them. Ice is also taking up Capoeira so we thought she could incorporate the moves she knew from Capoeira with the ones that Talim does ingame.
With the costume and props on the way, all we needed to do was book our tickets to Singapore and our stay there. We booked tickets through Tiger Airways and by some really good luck, we were able to book ourselves at a good hotel.
Continued in Part 2...