SDS 2.2 – Catch You Catch Me

Cosfest. This episode is on Cosfest. It is a yearly cosplay event at Downtown East, usually in the middle of the year! It’s free too and usually the preliminaries for those to represent Singapore at the World Cosplay Summit in Japan is on during that weekend. The first day is the band/karaoke/singing contest while the second has the main cosplay competitions. I went for both so the pictures below will be on both days and will be mixed!

The theme for this year is “Let’s make friends”. Yes, let us indeed. Also, this post will have anime and character terms so if you don’t get it, just look at the pictures instead for the pretty.

A mixed bunch of people, the usual Adventure Crew came and ok you can see our stuff there. Mine is the pink haired doll (plus the Totodile and master ball). This is interesting to note to see in other pics. Just for you to note, she’s got an Obitsu body and I forgot which brand she was for the head. Anyway, she’s totally vinyl. Pikachu hat is Avariel‘s along with her resin girls below and the Cyndaquil is Raven‘s.

Yes as we got into the D’Marquee, there were stalls setting up and everything. There was the usual artists booths with art, doujinshis, jewelry etc but oho, what is this? Yes, there’s usually stalls with dolls of the ball jointed sort but hey look! A more expensive and bigger version of my doll! Funness.

I have no idea how to post the pictures for the rest of this post because they are so many! But anywho, the traditional graffiti wall is there for people to draw on! At the end of it all, you can see a lot of pretty sketches and doodles on it. It’s not your usual stickmen, you might see some artists drawing diligently on them.

Heh, as we walked along, some Ghostbusters were there to check out the scene.

It was a pretty crowded scene alright.

Meanwhile this year had a lot of shirtless guys and bikini girls. Well, not really but their characters are more on the belly baring sort or the somewhat vest type instead of shirts for guys. Also amazingly with the increase of hot characters, there were lots of pretty traps too! If you don’t know what a trap is, it’s ok. For those who missed Cosfest, ha ha ha ha if any of the perv photogs took pics of the traps.

The quality of cosplay this year increased a lot. This time the details are getting more insane as we include technogadgetry too. People are remembering their science in school so they can use their knowledge on resistors and electronics. Not everyone but enough of it that it’s turning out to be the trend to include it in costumes that need it.

Let’s head out once more. People usually like to take pictures on the lawn since there’s more light there and you get to meet other friends etc. Well, I did anyway.

Oh yes! There were very good looking Kamen Riders (their leather suits had the correct colours and detailing!) and a lot of rangers! It reminded me of the Forever Red episode. If you want your own helmet, you can get it at Custom Workz. Also, with the influx of hot characters and technogadgetry, more mascots are being done up! If you can’t guess what the second picture is, get punny.

It’s a firefox.

The other one is a character from one of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies hugging a ghost from Pacman. I think it is a character from HM’s movies since I can’t remember anyway.

We were told this is a monster from a game. Yes. That is a real plant on top. Other mascot type characters I didn’t manage to take pictures of was the hamster thing from Full Metal Panic.

If you think this is a teen only event. Hah! Nowadays you have more children in cosplay and they’re usually with their parents, relatives or older siblings! Fun note though, for those in REALLY ultra detailed costumes are usually more of the working adults. The sort where you see it’s like real armour and whatnot. So really, it’s an all ages hobby.

Also for those wondering on the costumes, don’t be silly. No. You can’t generally buy it off the rack, especially for the kids. You make or get them tailored.

Now let’s head on to the Pokemon, yeah, yeah! These are Pokemon ginjinka!

The ratticate (or rattata? I can’t remember or see from the pic if it “evolved”) had on rat shoes which was pretty cute!

Anyway, this is a Caterpie, that’s how the original Pokemon looks like. Let’s see how it is when it’s a Pokemon ginjinka!

You can see her on the first picture on the left most position! So cute! Also since some of us characters were supposedly afraid of bugs, especially Misty, she would go “Ahhh, ahhh!” at Caterpie. I think it was the biggest team of a very long running series there at Cosfest! You had the various versions of Nurse Joy too and the different versions of the main characters of the games.

Fun fact, if you see the referee in the picture, yes he is also the referee when we went to the Pokemon tournament (including Misty and Ash!).

Let’s have some K-ON before we head back inside the D’Marquee.

Performances or competitions were onstage. Yeah, it seems the crowd definitely increased from last year in terms of both cosplayers and photographers. Less random people in proportion to the majority of the people who know what’s going on there.

Meanwhile, have one of the band performances for the competitions on day 1.

On day 2, before the prize presentations, the Singapore Wind Symphony played some songs but for the last encore, they did Sephiroth’s theme! And with that song everyone sang the bits of “Sephiroth!” in the song (and also because we can’t remember the Latin lyrics anyway) .

And then we got to know the winners who’ll represent us in the World Cosplay Summit. Their performance was really woah that when they were on stage everyone tried to watch and did the mass “ORHHHH!” sound when they fought.

And then after the prizes were given out, it was a group picture session. (Yes, I have pictures of the winners but I’ll put them at the end!) There are more cosplayers than that but yeah, well anyway I’m sure the group picture is out somewhere on the internets or SGCafe.

And then for the first time in all of Cosfest, a parade around Downtown East led by the winners (and officials of DTE) to a background music of Caramell Dansen in which everyone sang and danced to at specific points. Frankly, I have a clue why there’s a parade of sorts happening too if anyone knows of the other event that was happening on the same weekend. Heh, well that’s speculation anyway.

As we all went on the parade around DTE, we were amused because we were talking of how the parents were with some children and how we thought some children wanted “to be like that!” as they pointed.

For you see, some of the parents might give the excuse of not wanting their children to cosplay by telling them that only bad grade students like to do this etc and to concentrate on studies or else you’d fail bla bla.

Even funner fact: All this is not necessarily true. Most of the cosplayers are actually grade A students, teachers or even successful business people etc. Usually, a lazy bad grade student wouldn’t want to make an effort to do that much work to make a proper costume with intricate details. Seriously, you need to be the type that’s diligent to even want to do a proper job of it.

Seriously, it’s really freakish like woah when you learn of the individual cosplayers and that they’re actually engineers/scientists/animators/etc. Anyway, the parade ends and it was fun, we end up back at D’Marquee where the booth people are also packing up.

And then we were plunged into darkness. Um, ok. Guess, that’s time for us to leave.

Our representatives are the first picture! They’re from Final Fantasy (13?) and then the next two are winners of the Asia Cosplay Meet! The middle one leading the parade is from One Piece and he’s from Singapore while Kosmos, the lighted up blurry pic is from Thailand! They both won tickets to Japan.

The WCS winners won tickets, lodgings etc to Japan while they represent Singapore! Kosmos is a good example of technogadgetry. I didn’t get a good picture of her since there were a lot of photographers around her taking pics. A lot of people are making use of LED lights and whatnot nowadays.

If the crowd is this much this year, well wow. No idea how Cosfest is going to be like in 2011.