rallamajoop

It's going to take a couple of posts to get through everything during/post Wai-con this year. To start with I wanted to talk about that pretty damn epic Avatar group that won us the Best Group Skit Award on Saturday. Our secret weapon? Glowy twirly things on strings!

The lighting on stage was less than ideal, especially for capturing video footage, but that aside we're pretty pleased with the quality of this particular youtube vid, which captured the whole skit.

Inevitably, some lines get lost under the audience cheering, but

velithya has already posted a full transcript which you can find here.

Here's another version of just the fight scene, which captures the action from a slightly better angle.

I'm guessing no-one's going to be all that surprised to hear that a heck of a lot of prep work went into putting this together; it's not much of an exaggeration to say we have been planning this skit all year. Obviously we're all Avatar fans, but half the motivation for getting the group together in the first place was always the brilliant excuse it gave us to use poi in a cosplay skit. My sister and I have been doing poi twirling for several years now, mostly self-taught from Internet tutorials. Give or take the inevitability of hitting yourself in the face a few times while learning it's surprisingly easy to pick up, and with glow poi in low light even simple moves can look really specky. We've been cosplaying even longer than we've been doing poi, so a chance to show both off together was too good to miss.

How that went from maybe two or three of us doing the poi thing on stage to the single largest cosplay group we've ever been part of was entirely thanks to a string of lucky coincidences, starting way back before the lazt Wai-con when Lisa sent out an email to most of our cosplay friends to say, hey guys, I'm cosplaying Azula next year, anyone want to join me? – and ending with someone having put up their hand for every one of the main five good guys plus three of the main villains only a few emails later. Of course, nothing so organised so far in advance could possibly go to plan; in the months before the con it turned out that all three of the friends who'd been planning to fly in from interstate to join us wouldn't be able to make it, but with a bit more luck we managed to recast them – the last only two weeks before the con.

As is becoming traditional, after the comp we went out to the foyer to take some photos as a group, though not as many as we'd have liked. The weather was too awful for us to go outside, the lighting indoors was not particularly good, and we were missing our Mai. We're already planning to get together for a proper photoshoot sometime in the near future though.

The Cast

I do have to say, as much as a shame as it was not to get to see

yijichan,

chisathechi and Sam at Wai-con this year, the group we ended up with were as awesome a bunch of people to hang out with for the day as I could have asked for. Here's a very brief introduction to each of them.

pinneagig/Risachantag
Azula/Poi Choreography/Sound Editing

No exaggeration to say that Lisa was the main reason the group happened at all. Aside from organising and coordinating the group and bringing the bulk of the poi experience, she also did all the recording and sound editing for the skit (not to mention all the flame effects on those photos). Back at Manifest earlier last year she did a solo poi skit as Azula in part as a kind of full dress rehearsal for the main event and pulled off a fantastic job despite having torn a ligament in her knee only a month earlier. She totally shows the other two of us up with her mad poi skillz, but being Azula that's nothing but appropriate.

velithya
Zuko/Fight Choreography

I'm pretty sure Velithya's been planning to cosplay Zuko even longer than Lisa had been planning Azula. She hasn't been doing poi nearly as long as Lisa and I and was too flat out with other commitments earlier last year to do as much practice with us as we'd have liked, but once we finally got down to practice properly she picked up her new moves in no time flat.

sansele
Aang

Sansele shaved her head for charity a while back and looked the part so perfectly she was practically mobbed by the rest of us going, “OMG, you must cosplay Aang!” Naturally, she shaved her head again for Wai-con.

drayke_
Sokka
Totally won the prize for Most In Character All Day (if not all month). Drayke is just generally a blast to get to cosplay with.

HotaruKitty
Toph

HotaruKitty was a last-minute addition to our group after yijichan had to pull out. Lucky for us she'd made a Fire Nation Toph costume for last year's Supanova, saw Lisa's Wai-con forum post that was our last-ditch attempt at finding a Toph, and was happy to join us. Though I don't think we'd ever even spoken before a week before Wai-con, she turned out to be a lot of fun to work with.

Maree
Ty Lee

We've known Maree for a few years through PenCafe, but Ty Lee was her first cosplay and her first real sewing experience. I'd say the results speak for themselves.

Lauren
Mai

Our original Mai cosplayer was one of the friends from interstate who couldn't make it, but was happy to lend us her costume. Lauren (Maree's sister and another one of the artists we met through PenCafe) ended up in the group largely thanks to just happening to be around while we were talking about it, but had a good time with it and was a great sport about it all, even despite having to run off and get changed again right after our skit for the cheerleading performance at the end of the cosplay. The only shame is that we didn't get to take any photos with her afterwards.

Me
Katara/Poi choreography/Script

Hard to believe now that I wasn't even supposed to be part of the Avatar group. Our original Katara was

chisathechi (who does make one damn good Katara), who sadly wasn't able to join us at Wai-con this year. But with such an epic group and all our poi battle plans taking shape, I could hardly resist the chance to join in.

How about a few more photos?

Putting the skit together

(all that stuff we didn't quite get a chance to talk about on stage when everyone was still recovering)
Wow, where to even begin with this one. We started serious work on the poi section of the skit back in December, with our music selected and choreography underway, but we'd been talking about what moves might work since right after Lisa's solo skit at Manifest. To work, moves were going to have to look reasonably offensive/defensive, not run more than very minimal risk of ending with everyone's poi tangled up or someone getting hit in the face, and fit one of the bending styles. We settled on fast, split-time moves for firebending, mostly based around the four-point weave, and more flowing moves for waterbending, often with both poi moving together. How much of that last detail the audience noticed on the day with all of us up there doing stuff at once I wouldn't like to guess, though looking back at the videos the colours alone played a big part in making sure we all stood out. We used flow poi, which come in nice bright colours with a ready made elemental theme; red for fire, blue-white for Azula's fire, and blue-green plus short flags for water. (No, we did not ever seriously consider twirling real fire on stage – the organisers would have had heart attacks even if we didn't.)

The music came from the Season 3 Trailer – the last 60 seconds thereof to be exact. Lisa used the a piece called Agni Kai for her solo Azula skit but it didn't have the sense of urgency we needed for a battle scene, and though Avatar certainly isn't short on dramatic battle music nothing else but the trailer music had both the strong climax and the fast beat we needed. Despite a few initial doubts (“I dunno, isn't it a bit too fast? Don't we want something longer? Look, if we're really stuck, we can always use the Mortal Kombat theme...”) by the time we were midway through the task of choreographing the fight section it was becoming pretty evident that the piece was basically perfect (much slower and the poi wouldn't have looked as impressive, much longer and we would have been seriously tight on time for the rest of the skit). Some of the main accents where poi and music worked especially well fell into place almost by accident.

Since Lisa has Taekwondo experience and Velithya Karate, we had to include a short martial arts section with the poi wrapped up in their fists, though even then the glow poi in their hands often stole the scene. With the lights down so low, I'm not sure much of the audience would have caught the main narrative moment in the battle – where Katara and Zuko end up side by side and exchange glances before they move back in to take down Azula by working together. But just so you know, it's in there.

If the poi took us two months of rehearsal, the spoken part of the skit was written in about half an hour, rehearsed in full for the first time and recorded the Saturday before the con, and edited down to time and submitted at what ended up disturbingly close to the final deadline. This is not to say that the non-poi section wasn't just as important: with a three minute limit and one minute already gone to poi, that left us with two minutes to give the remaining five members of the group reason to be there and set up the fight. Sokka, being Sokka, still got to talk a lot. Toph got a bit gipped out of a role since I wasn't even sure we were going to have a Toph when I wrote the script and in any case she doesn't have as much as a beef with Zuko as the other characters. Mai and Ty Lee, minor as the job might seem, were still essential as a reason to clear the other non-poi characters off stage.

sansele couldn't take a lead role in the main fight and it wouldn't do for the rest of us to be showing the Avatar up, so instead Aang got the punchline at the end. The finished skit came out at 3 minutes and about 0.5 seconds, and a couple of lines had to be cut at the last minute to get it down that far, but even with all those constraints I'd say the whole narrative and gag elements turned out as well as anyone could have asked.

Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 9:53 AM

Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 10:53 AM

The main rehearsal day was a such a blast; first time we'd had the whole group in one place and first time the three of us doing the poi had gotten to show off the routine. It must have taken a dozen takes worth of misread lines (“Azula's far away and she's heading right here!” “Chill guys, we've still got a good couple of weeks!”), missed cues (“Katara? ...Katara? KATARA?”) random sentai poses, Team Rocket jokes, and debatably IC flirting to get the whole thing blocked out, not counting time taken waiting for everyone to stop laughing. So basically I'd say it all went pretty smoothly.

Backstage nerves on the day weren't really that bad since we kept ourselves busy listening back through the audio, waiting for our last member to arrive, running in circles trying to track down whoever the hell we were supposed to talk to about getting the stage lights dimmed during the poi segment (not a jab against anyone working on the cosplay comp who were all as helpful as we could have asked, just understandably busy) and dying of heat stroke in the corridor. Finally we got to our turn.

I think we all knew right from John's introduction that it was going to go down well. The joke about the movie went down even better than I'd expected and the cheering at the end... you probably can't see in that video, but I'm grinning my head off.

Thank yous

So that's pretty much the whole story, but there are a few last people who helped us out along the way in some way big or small, and this would not be done without mentioning them. So a big thank you:

To Sam for sending us her Mai costume and

chisathechi for lending me her gorgeous Katara necklace

To all the cosplay staff at Wai-con for all their hard work running the event

To Ruth for minding our stall while we were at the whole cosplay comp

amenokitarou for coming out to take photos with us after the cosplay

And to everyone else in our group for just generally being awesome

Omake

The below is the text of a group email exchange with only a few edits to clarify who sent which message. I include it mostly because I can't believe we kept it up this long right up through the last days of crunch time before the con.

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 6:59 PM:

On 27/01/2011, at 7:03 PM

On Jan 27, 2011 at 7:47 PM

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 7:57 PM

On 28/01/2011, at 9:57 AM

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 10:04 AM

On 28 January 2011 13:22

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDW60281.shtml

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 6:23 PM

Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 6:39 PM

On 28/01/2011, at 6:41 PM

On 28 January 2011 19:16

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 7:28 PM