Comics

Shooting Cosplay: A Creative Journey

The Creative Frustration

Shooting cosplay came from two polar creative fronts: my frustration of illustrating and love of photography. Back in high school, I was one of those doodling kids who wanted to draw what I read in the comics. The stuff I used to read were several Marvel X-Men titles and Batman. What resulted out of it were crash courses through summer art school and glorified stick figures. I also left several unused easels and drawing boards in the wake of my pursuit. I slowly came to accept that I couldn’t draw, but somewhat had an eye for graphic design. I knew how to put together pieces of a creative puzzle but couldn’t make them on my own. I dabbled as the art director in our school publication but it was in college when the camera was first introduced to me.

My cousin was taking up weekend photography classes in another nearby university and would often bring home sheets of paper to develop alongside the manuals. Started reading them on the side, learning the process of developing film in the darkroom. From there, I stared saving up for a camera through side projects I used to do as graphic / web designer. The shutterbug firmly bit when finally got an apprenticeship with a family friend. I guess the rest is history.

My journey in photography certainly wasn’t a straightforward one. It’s a series of glass ceilings after another – often seeing the next potential yet can’t seem to get there. It was that frustration that led me to start searching for my own handle in taking pictures. I had to ween off making bad attempts copying how other photographers light their images. I had to own my pictures. How became the biggest question.

It wasn’t until I was shooting for several years when I thought of putting together my love for comics and anime with photography. I started to get drawn to images entailing certain levels of production design. The bigger, grander, more complicated… the more I welcomed the challenge. I started referencing inanimate objects (e.g. dolls, mannequins, etc…) into our early work. When we finally got to mount my second exhibit “Pop Nostalgia” with the Crucible Gallery in 2009, I had an inkling pop culture was becoming my anchor for creativity.

Rhian Ramos as Rogue — Rogue in Flight, 2011. This was our first “official” cosplay shoot, after dabbling with peripheral concepts of pop-culture.

Production Credits

Make-up: Ten Franco
Hair: Charlie Manapat
tyling: Hannah Kim
Costume Production: Badj Genato
Production Designer: Raffy Tesoro
Art Direction: Javey Villones
Digital Imaging: Ghani Madueno
Model: Rhian Ramos

Just like how I dabbled with graphic design, it had parallels with my photography. I wasn’t really good at generating my own ideas, but learned how to reference more known genres and imagery. I didn’t even know about the term “cosplay photography” until a couple of years after. That was when people started calling our work as such. Personally, I just wanted to give homage to pop culture icons of my youth.

Regular pictures of people in costume was out of the question. We wanted to push the imagery, to bring it back to full circle, blurring the lines between a picture and an illustration. This came about several trial and error experiments for a few years partnering up with advertising creatives. The body of work during these early years produced a variety of results, but never the full satisfaction of accomplishment. There was big room for improvement, and that feeling of “what-if” always lingered after every shoot was done.

alicewonderland_final — The Tea After Party, 2010. One of the milestone images we have achieved as a team.

Production Credits:

Make-up / Grooming: Noel Flores / Charlie Manapat / Nadia Bouhou
Styling: Mico Calma / Badj Genato
Art Direction: Jay Tablante / Angelo Lico
Production Design: Raffy Tesoro
Digital Imaging: Angelo Lico
Models: Alodia Gosiengfiao / Ashley Gosiengfiao / Natalia Santiago / Faus Ongtengco / Maria Dolonius

In 2010 was perhaps when we stumbled upon a milestone when we produced this mash-up interpretation of Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland called, “The Tea After Party.” It was only then when we had a resemblance of synergy between photography, make-up, styling, set design and post production. Of course we still regretted a lot of things we wished could’ve been done, but that’s already a lingering frustration from every work we do. It was from this image where a dramatic shift in our current style has stemmed from.

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Work Process

Having past experience in publishing and advertising prior to photography proved to be valuable as we started to streamline the thought process of coming up with cosplay shoots. It wasn’t enough to come up with one-hit wonders and then forgetting how the process was done. We wanted something that can be repeatable. Creativity energy is preserved and targeting towards a particular goal.

Every advertising shoot doesn’t push forward without a pre-production organizer. It can come in various formats, but the most common is a PowerPoint presentation. If we are to follow a full-blown version of such a deck, it would contain the following:

Team Members involved
Character background
- This puts everybody in the same page when it comes to character design since a lot of characters have various costume designs.
Make-up pegs
- Illustrations aren’t exactly the best sources for make-up since it’s an approximation of the human form.
Styling / Costume design
- This shows the details of how the costume is made, from the fabric to the fitting sessions with the model.
Art Direction
- This tackles the situation and pose the model would be doing. This is commonly mistaken with photography.
- This is accompanied with a composite (a.k.a. “compre” in local advertising parlance) of how the final image is going to appear.
Lighting Treatment / Photography
- The approach in lighting style and method in achieving the look set by the art direction.
Production Design
- This tackles the props sourcing and an idea of what the set / location would look like.
Post Production
- A guide for the selected image/s to be worked on
- The kinds of composition and clean up that need to be done.
Casting
- Who the model is for the shoot.

This pre-production organizer is the heart and soul of the shoot. This sums up the current progress and the checklist of things to be done before anything gets done.

This is one aspect of commercial shooting we strive to introduce into cosplay photography. This level of organization funnels creativity from a spray into a powerful hose targeted to achieve one image. When everybody is uniformly briefed about the concept, the team is put into one focus.

Taking these factors in, it may seem to be complicated for any newbie to start shooting cosplay, but it all boils down to solving one problem at a time. As each problem is solved, the process becomes clearer. When you finally come up with an image, repeat this method until you get the hang of going through the creative routine.

It took our team several years before we have developed a system of coming up with cosplay shoots, and it is still far from perfect. But the advantage of having one is following a logical flow of solving a creative problem of coming up with an image.

Sharing below some behind the scenes of our past shoots over the years.

Photo Gallery

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Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Geekology 2.0: Analysis of Archetypes

Author’s Note: Hindsight is always 20/20. There’s always something you’d end up skipping when you write things the first time around. So if you happen to purchase the 2nd book and been patient enough to read the text, you could all this an append to the Archetypes section.

Just a quick refresher from the book, an archetype is defined as the basis from which all character design comes from. They are either created by a single person or group of people, then introduced into the public as fact.

My first example from the book would be The Joker, and how his archetype is broken down to the visual elements you see. Any other clown not wearing the same clothes, or make-up simply isn’t akin to The Joker. Much the same way as how we know what makes Batman, well… Batman — by recalling the visual elements that reminds us of the overall archetype.

Characters are created through a variety of ways as vast as one’s imagination can offer. This oversimplified list is by no means an attempt to classify the only ways to come up with characters to a few methods. I suggest viewing this as something like a skeleton road map to understand how our imagination can come up with all sorts of creations specially to building archetypes. Something where we could get some points to jump off from to get the thought process started.

More often than not, as original as some characters may sound, at the heart of their creation, they would always be inspired by some other outside source.

References and Amalgams

Historical Reference

These are archetypes created from historical context — either from actual people or a mixture of several. One solid example would be Kenshin Himura (Samurai X or Rorouni Kenshin). The events in the anime was based from Japanese history to begin with, but Kenshin’s in particular was from this actual samurai, Kawakami Gensai who was known for his legendary swordsmanship skills during the late Edo period.

Romanticized ReferenceUnlike historical sources, these characters are built upon the foundations of older mythology and literature. Superman was partly inspired from biblical and mythological characters such as Samson and Hercules as Siegel and Shuster later on explained in interviews.

These are the characters whose archetype design is based on more established “templates”. The referencing can be a direct relationship, or an amalgam of other sources. Eventually as other characters are created, the established ones become the references. Bizarro is anchored to Superman and without the latter to establish the archetype, the character in question (Bizarro) doesn’t gain much foothold.

Generic Reference

These are characters born from a generalized set of parameters not akin to any particular person. We derive a persona from nameless traits describing a particular set or subset in society. In a sense, the character created from this method can either be a championed or stereotyped version.The Japanese school girl or the sailor fuku wardrobe in particular has spawned numerous characters based on its generic archetype design. You could see them from 90s arcade games (e.g. Rival Schools), movies (Gogo Yubari), the zombie anime (High School of the Dead) to classics such as Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The amount of referencing varies between character to character, and doesn’t have any strict requirement to follow. Furthermore, the discernment of a character’s source inspirations are at the discretion of the creator. “The Bride” in Kill Bill as portrayed by Uma Thurman is a homage to Bruce Lee, but the iconic tracksuit was just as far as the “The Bride” character references from him.

Character and Aliases

We also have established characters such as Superman and Batman eventually having gained secondary names and references:

The Caped Crusader
The Dark Knight
Man of Steel

It’s like having another layer of fiction encapsulating an already established one. This only happens when certain characters gain a level of popularity and cements their existence in pop culture.

Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Trese: High Tide at Midnight – A Fan Review

I recently got my own complimentary copy of Trese 6: High Tide at Midnight recently when dropped by Budjette’s office in BGC.

I’m a huge fan of Trese. This is outside the fact that Budjette is a good friend and a contemporary in the industry. This is one local title that caught my imagination in such a long time. How they make use of local folklore and bringing it into modern times is its greatest appeal to me. The (scary) stories of aswang, dwendes, tikbalangs have been translated into the urban landscape.

Trese, along with other millennial contemporary titles (e.g. Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah, Sky World etc…) gave a renewed interest in Philippine comics. It has evolved from your typical monthly issues back in the day to a more slick-looking graphic novel format. Nonetheless this reintroduces the “Komiks” to a younger generation who may have missed the golden age when the industry went zilch.

From a case to case anthology, we’re now seeing longer narratives starting with Book 3 and 5, story arcs akin to most mainstream comics. I guess this was a necessary shift to show more growth with Alexandra and her exploits. A case-to-case approach wasn’t enough to introduce more complicated plot threads. By Book 6, she’s no longer alone as joined by self-proclaimed superhero Maliksi (a hunky Tikbalang) who has a crush on her, members of the Trese family and some “super” friends. You also would notice a larger undercurrent involvement of the “Madame” secretly pushing her own agenda. Whether she sides to good or evil remains to be ambiguous at this point.

It is established that you have been reading the previous books to get an idea on the various myths and creatures going about the city. If you’re just picking up Trese now, I highly suggest brushing up on the hard bound compilation to get a sense of the world Alexandra is revolving in.

Noticeable with Book 6, mystery gives way to more action and you could feel the build-up to something big — like a final confrontation between Madame and Trese. The end just happens to be the start. Budjette always makes it a point to leave you on a cliffhanger.

Just a little showcase of Trese-related cosplay shoots we did in the past.

For as long as Budjette and Kajo chuck out more stories, Trese would be in my regular cosplay to-do list in the foreseeable future.

Check out my youtube channel for your regular glimpse behind the scenes! While you’re at it, drop buy the online store and get goodies from your favorite models!

For those interested in my commercial work, check out pointblankstudios.net and follow us at @pointblankmnl in IG.

Cosplay Shoot: Harley Quinn

Shooting Cosplay: A Creative Journey

Geekology 2.0: Analysis of Archetypes

Geekology 2.0: Techniques in Cosplay Photography

Trese: High Tide at Midnight – A Fan Review