Ask Adam Savage: Designing Props for Cosplay vs. Films

Ryan Peck says, When it comes to being nervous of getting into cosplay and walking around a con, what would you say to help ease the trepidation? And what costume at Silicon this year simply blew you away? I have a specific technique when I'm nervous about doing something, which is you can't make yourself less nervous. You can do breathing exercises, you can take a half a Xanax or whatever works for you, but you can't really turn off nervousness. You can learn techniques for being comfortable with it, however. And one of my favorite... I hosted a poetry reading many, many years ago, back when that was the thing that people did, now 30 years ago. And at the beginning of it, I just kind of got up and I gave a little bit of an off-the-cuff speech about the evening and what one could expect. And when I came off, my friend Panda said to me, yeah, I had a friend named Panda back then. Panda said, you were so relaxed, it made everyone else relaxed. Because I said, how did that go, do you think? And she said, well, it went really well. You were so relaxed, it made everyone relaxed. And I thought, what an interesting perspective. And ever after, whenever I'm about to do some performance-related thing and I'm nervous about it, and I'm frequently nervous when I have to interview someone on stage. That's a tougher thing than just being an interviewee. That doesn't make me nervous at all. But interviewing someone else, I feel a responsibility. And I sometimes do get tense before a show. So what I do is I remind myself that I can't control my nervousness, but I can control my body. I can relax my muscle groups. I can think to myself, is my neck relaxed? Are my shoulders relaxed? Is my belly relaxed? Is my butt relaxed? Are my legs relaxed? Just working through that. So the other thing that you can do if you're getting into cosplay is remember the pose. Remember the character. You're going into a character. If you're worried that you're not going to be good enough in the character, then I would exhort you to look around the con and realize that hitting a high-quality mark for everyone is not what a con is about. There are certainly some people there who are there to challenge themselves and show off in the best way. And they bring huge, elaborate costumes of incredible precision. Beverly Down and Calbert Crunchy, famous for doing these kinds of things. But they're not walking around going, look at that one. None of that is really going on because that stuff gets clamped down on really quickly. There's just, there's not a lot of gatekeeping out there. So you should remind yourself, even though you are nervous getting ready for cosplay, that everyone out there just wants you to have fun. And if you are having fun, that is what the point is. Seriously. And part of having fun is the fact that your costume's uncomfortable and you'll get sweaty and you'll get tired and something will start to chafe and you'll get sore, etc. You will stink. All of those things are true. And yet, man, at the core of all that is just nothing but joy for me. And commensurate with that, John Zizolfo has a question. How do you convincingly cosplay the idea of negative space on a character with deceptively thin, non-human body proportions? Navi from Avatar, Jack Skellington, etc. And then John says, and I'm going to take you to task for this, John, just a little bit. I know about the general grievance someone did when they're inside the cape, but to me, that makes it more of a life-size puppet than a cosplay. John, are you gatekeeping cosplay? That's not acceptable on this. In this forum, I don't accept that. I have seen that general grievance and it is a shocking and amazing thing to witness in person. And I do not delineate cosplay as to whether the performer is either immediately in the costume or a foot behind the costume operating the levers. Another one is Darren Moser's K2SO is another one like that. And Darren also did the BB-1, right? BD-1. Okay, so Darren did a BD-1 and his negative space, which was behind BD-1, was a black clad glove and black controllers. And everyone he interacted, everyone that BD-1 interacted with, just didn't see Darren. So I think those are answers to your question. If you have other ideas about how to sculpt negative space or you're grappling with a problem, I will say, you know, it's all about proportion. It's not necessarily about getting the size exactly right to the movie at that point. It's about really understanding the lines, right? It's like dressing to a silhouette. If you've heard that term in fashion and in costuming, the actual layout of how the costume lands on someone's body is important, but so is the overall silhouette that they create. And I work with both of those metrics when I'm trying to nail down how a costume looks and should look. For instance, I can't stand the pictures we took of me, Norm, in the Doctor Strange costume, because that costume is perfect, but it's still not quite perfectly fit to me. And so it tends to make me, I don't know, I feel like that costume makes me look barrel shaped. And Doctor Strange is not barrel shaped, as much as I may be barrel shaped. Doctor Strange is lithe and longer. And so I need to find a couple of ways to help make that costume kind of gesture towards that. And I don't know how that, you know, I don't know what those solutions will end up being. The fact is, is that I realize now that my Doctor Strange and my Mandalorian costume are both sort of on hold because my mirror broke, and I need a new full-size mirror in here for doing specifically that kind of costuming. I worked really hard on that form for the Star-Lord costume. And I ended up changing the length of the jacket ever so slightly to really sculpt that negative space, that silhouette. Grant Green wants to know, how does your approach when planning a prop change when designing for cosplay versus a movie or display piece? Well, all three of those are radically, radically different. In my experience, there's a major difference in construction. Cosplay props should be lighter. This is 100% true. A friend of mine who's a Ghostbusters cosplayer has some back issues. And consequently, even the lightest pack that most people wear is too heavy for him. And he's gone to great lengths to use balloon-filled resin, sorry, micro-balloon-filled resins and other techniques for keeping that pack as light as humanly possible. For a display piece, all bets are off. With a display piece that no one's going to touch, well, that can be kind of anything you want. But for a movie, there are many different versions of a prop for a film. There's the stunt version. There's a stand-in version. There's a fighting version. There's often a superhero close-up version. Many of the super close-ups of swords from Lord of the Rings were of metal masters that Peter Lyon had sculpted. But if you're more than five feet away from the camera, I guarantee you that's aluminum. And if you're 10 feet away from the camera, I guarantee you that thing is made of polyurea and lacquer. Yeah. I mean, that's also always part of the decision tree of... It's a great question because it highlights that there is no one right way to build something. And this reminds me of this thing. People have asked me in the past, when you build stuff for special effects that has to get blown up, blown up, do you mind blowing it up? And for reference, I'll point out that all of the pod race crashes in the pod race for episode one were practical. Those were all shot out on the slab. And if you've ever seen any of the miniature work from the Pirates of the Caribbean films with the Black Pearl and the explosions, all those were filmed... When you see those happening outdoors on a big concrete slab, that literally is the slab behind the Industrial Light and Magic sound stages over in San Rafael. And that slab is where all that stuff... That slab is where all that stuff gets filmed. Oh, right. I'm so sorry. Ryan Peck wanted to know what costume blew me away at Silicon. There were some wonderful stuff on display. There were a couple I thought were really pretty special, specifically because they were weird and wonderful cuts. Somebody came dressed... And we'll include a link. Someone came dressed as the Winchester Mystery House. Their skirt was the Winchester Mystery House. And by the way, for everyone who participated in the cosplay contest at Silicon next year, I promise you there will be a ramp. Stairs for a cosplay contest? No. I realize now the error of our ways. And we will have a ramp because the Winchester Mystery House had trouble displaying her costume at the cosplay contest. And so did a couple of other folks. Climbing stairs is hard. Climbing stairs in my Chewbacca costume is fraught and terrifying. So the Winchester Mystery House. And then also someone came as the Alien Queen. But they came as like, as like Queen Victoria. It looked like what they took as a guiding principle was Queen Victoria in a mourning dress. Mourning, M-O-U-R, not M-O-R-N. A mourning dress was all black and silver with ruffled collars, all of it custom built. And then this huge Alien Queen head made out of foam. My favorite touch was that the teeth looked amazing. And when I looked at them up close, I realized the teeth of that alien are all acrylic nails, just spray painted silver. And dude, they look so awesome. That's one of my favorite things about looking at cosplays is seeing the secret tricks that someone figured out to do something awesome. Those two are exactly my favorite kind of cosplay mashup of taking a couple of ideas and bringing them together and creating something that is way greater than the sum of the parts. That the Alien Queen made all of our heads explode, I swear to God. Yeah, just love that. Norm has a picture that I have on my phone. You were taking a picture of the Alien Queen and you look so happy. Yeah, that thing was incredible. Thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to support us even further, you can by becoming a tested member. Details are, of course, below, but it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time. 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