hey everybody adam savage bouncing adam savage here in my cave answering questions
from tested patrons and today's comes from christopher amritsch and christopher says
is there a cosplay you have seen recently at the conventions that has used some technique
you now want to try um i have been it's been con season uh the lack of cons through all of 2020
and a goodly portion of 2021 uh means that i have done i think seven cons since mid-august
it has been a lot of travel and it's met a lot of fans it has been great i've made some great
friends at these cons and it's been really nice and it has been fantastic to see the cosplays
that people have been working on um things i've seen on cosplays recently that i wanted to try
um in new york i met up with my great friends uh who i am also intensely admirers of
cowboy crunchy the cosplaying duo riggan regan and uh scone every time i see them they're just
showing off the most incredible constructions and in this new video which will include a link
in the comments below um regan does this beautiful baroque dress um with a bunch of
custom embroidery like super embroidery gold embroidery filigree all over it and
i didn't know you could do i knew you could do that sort of stuff with an embroidery machine i
just i hadn't thought through what you could get done with it it so looking at that opened my eyes
to new possibilities with embroidery machines and apparently since i bought my embroidery
machine which is about four years ago now they are much better at taking designs from you
instead of having some library that you can only use um that was the case with my embroidery in
order to side load your own designs it was a real [ __ ] fight and that made me crazy
um here's a note to machine manufacturers uh don't give me a walled garden of content to make with
your dumb machine let me put anything i wanted to it okay can we make that deal can we do that
thank you um other techniques i have seen some incredible painting
a lot of the attention that cosplay gets is because of its physical form and you see
wonderful cosplayers um like cabot crunchy uh and beverly downen um doing incredible
things with lightweight materials like foams and plastics and warbl and getting just unbelievable
uh the the paladins of cosplay also showing off some incredible armor and that's another
video we'll include the link to below um but what often gets overlooked in the discussion i think
in the general public is the paint jobs on these constructions because painting can sometimes be
half or even way more of how the thing lands to the audience than just the physical form
i mean so much happens in the painting and it's not like it cosplayers are ignoring this at all
i just think that when the public sees like one of these giant armors from i don't know the games
i'm sorry but like you know the giant armors from anime and from video games um that they think wow
look at that hue it looks huge it looks really heavy and it's super lightweight and that is one
aspect but the other thing is like it looks like it's made of metal rusty metal it's beautiful or
uh as i saw in florida a cosplayer showing me um this winged form where she had done these really
simple acrylic slashes on it that added so much depth to it clearly she had this incredible
knowledge of paint and depth and was using that to basically double the elaborateness of her foam
constructions it was an amazing thing to see it was like a magic trick because from a distance
it looked incredibly complex when you got up you saw that it was simpler but the paint was adding
so much to it um i this year for my cosplay i achieved a a real milestone for me with a painting
which is of the uh my iron man mark one suit uh i think it's the best paint job i've ever gotten
and it doesn't hold a candle to some of the stuff that i saw out there in the world among cosplayers
i've seen a lot more cosplayers and they really seem to have been started by the 501st and the
mandalorian mercs using comms to be able to speak more clearly so they have like a
voice the stormtroopers all have that stormtrooper voice the mandos have that mando voice uh and
that's great for the costume and the character but it's also really nice to be able to hear someone
in their costume when they're speaking i just completed a set of spacesuits a pair of spacesuits
and it's the first time i've put both a microphone inside that allowed me to speak
to people outside using a little pa speaker in addition to the comms i had going out i also had
plug-in noise canceling earbuds which i didn't even know you could buy until i looked it up
20 bucks for a pair of these plugged right into a little cheapo microphone that's like
you know i guess for people to hear better uh it's not a very dynamic solution for hearing
better it's a 24 solution to hearing better but from the inside of a costume having comes both in
and out and they were two separate systems that's what i loved about it the earbuds went right to a
microphone mounted to the front of the camera the microphone i had inside went to a speaker
outside so i had no feedback between the two systems they're just two completely easy turn key
systems and both were relatively inexpensive i got that idea from uh from cosplayers
i saw several executions of ben edie's wonderful chain mail
out there among cosplayers uh people are doing more and more impressive stuff with the uh
yeah i think that covers a goodly portion of some of the technologies i've seen um
wow okay no there is one more there is one more where was this
at one of the cons i'm so sorry i don't remember but again seven cons since mid-august
um at one of the cons i met a general grievous yeah i think many of you know with the general
grievous i refer to it is a general grievous where the operator is behind grievous
inside his cape it's it was such a beautiful thing so he's operating like an eight foot tall grievous
and he's hidden inside the cape and i love this so much i love the idea
of live puppetry like that and i did a little bit of this at new york comic con back in 2019 uh with
my no face cosplay with the uh what did you do the lips and the tongue that i built for no face
but the grievous it makes me think of some really interesting cosplay solutions like
bunraku where you're dressed all in black and puppeting a character in front of you yeah um
the grievous opened my eyes and apparently he's been doing it for years and refining it
every year and at this in the stage i saw it and it's a fairly highly refined piece
um it's an incredible solution and it's one that makes my brain go
so yeah it's been really inspiring to be out there and seeing what people have been building
christopher emerge thank you so much for your question if you'd like to know how to support
us and become a tested patron link is in the comments below as are links to my no face cosplay
uh the uh and some of the costumes that i've mentioned on here uh maybe not all of them because
sometimes it's hard to go find these old photos but uh thank you guys so
much for watching i'm adam savage in my cave and i will see you next time