Cosfest 2010 – with semi-crappy pictures.

Cosfest two years ago was the second con I ever went to, of which I have decidedly fond memories. So having missed last year’s, I decided I’d make a quick trip down this year on the second of the two days, (dragging zw along this time), to gawk me some cosplayers ;)

Photos are only semi-crappy this year because my phone-camera has been power-upped, though it’s still decidedly hopeless under the bad indoor lighting conditions. If that doesn’t deter you, jump on.

Little Domo-kun was one of the first uh.. things that greeted us as we entered the compound :)

All round it was more or less the same fun event I remember, nothing as flashy as stuff like AFA back in November, but there’s a cozy charm to having simply cosplay as the focal point of the entire thing. In fact, there seems to be even fewer booths this year than I remember from two years ago. Much of the floor was taken up by posing cosplayers, ringed by the customary hordes of gawkers photographers like myself.

Probably the only kind of cosplay (other than Naruto or Bleach) that you can always count on finding in any event here: Vocaloids!

Lack of booths notwithstanding, inching our way around the place remains quite the arduous affair as the crowd was expectedly immense, plus we were basically on constant guard against unwittingly getting in the way of someone else’s shooting. At one point I coulda sworn that I caught a glimpse of this pretty great Mio cosplayer who was featured at Nanee!? Sadly, she had vanished by the time I managed to squeeze myself nearby, and I tragically never saw her again for the rest of the day :(

Of course, doujin booths were in no short quantity. I was pretty tempted to get something, but I’m pretty impoverished at the moment. As usual.

As usual there is a big stage area with stuff constantly going on on it. When I arrived there was a group cosplay skit sort of contest going on, and man were they as amusing as I remember :) “Special effects” this time were pretty elaborate, with stuff like fog and elaborate costumes augmented with multi-coloured flashing lights being deployed to the audience’s delight. I wonder if those costumes and gadgets heat up and stuff :P Anyway, the picture above is of a couple of cosplayers apparently reenacting a scene from FF13, and this Bahamut guy had a pretty awesome getup. Fortunately for users of sub-par cameras like myself, Bahamut guy was later found roaming the grounds and vulnerable to much-closer range photography. Hence:

That’s Bahamut guy with the protagonist character on the right and… I’m not sure who mysterious black-robe is

Of course, no con is complete without dedicated scribble areas for some free and random expressions of creativity:

The nice thing about having the con down there at Downtown East is the availability of this fantastic lawn outside the main hall area where cosplayers and their admirers can enjoy wider spaces, fresher air, and much better lighting. Definitely better than ol Suntec, where cosplayers and congoers literally spill out onto the corridors beyond the hall and basically clog the whole thing up.

One more interesting thing happened while I was down there. At some point in the middle of the con, a bunch of folks suddenly gathered in the middle of the hall and stood holding their cellphones high in the air. They stood like that for a good bit of time and as I was wondering what in blazes were they up to when my friend zw noticed that most of them had yellow scarves and wristbands and such on. He conjectured that it was a Durarara!! parody – yknow, Dollars. We never confirmed that deduction, but hell would that have been cool :)

Speaking of Durarara!!..

We chanced upon Shizuo right as he was about to lose it and kick some ass. Pretty awesome stuff. By the way I love how Zaraki Kenpachi is standing in the corner there smirking to himself and looking all ‘meh you may be the strongest man on earth but guess who I am in Soul Society!’ :P

And… that’s about all there is to talk about I guess :) I was down there for two hours and thanks to the abundance of my phone battery my photo count stands at 42 after filtering off the bad ones. So I’m probably not gonna post all of them here – I’ll just pick out a select number. Here goes..

Macross Frontier cosplay still very much in fashion. I thought these folks more or less got the feel down.

Judging from the cool lights, probably one of the stage performers.

Yes you saw that right. That’s Man-Nanoha and his band of justice-preserving traps.

Speaking of justice, Kamen-rider and his sentai friends were also on hand in case any baddies decided to try and ruin the con.

Datte Masamune…

… and his gender-bended counterpart? Not entirely sure if she’s doing the same guy, but damn that’s bad-ass.

Simon and his Aniki were going around teaching people the meaning of GAR

While these ladies demonstrated the gentler side of things

And here’s one last one that I thought would be criminal not to feature: a cosplayer possibly proving once and for all that neko-mimi Azu-nyan is best done by loli’s with adorable smiles:

:) Interested in more semi-crappy photos? You can find the full set at my experimental Flickr account. Click in here.