Matka 2012 Nordic Travel Fair - Helsinki Finland!

Heya!

Three weeks ago, me (Elffi), Shufu, Majo and Rimppu (WCS 2012 representatives of Finland) worked at the MATKA 2012 Nordic Travel Fair in Helsinki. It is the biggest travel fair in Northern Europe. This year the fair attracted a total of 71.098 visitors. Wohoo! So many people and so much things to see!

We worked in the Japan booth for the weekend. We were all cosplaying and we held a little representation of cosplay. People in the fair were not so familiar with our hobby, so we were mostly telling about the history of cosplay in Finland and worldwide. Majo was also dancing some parapara! *grin*And we also had some fellow cosplayers from Helsinki gathered around the stage.

Both days were really great... If we don't count that I had to wake up 7:00 am to paint my tattoos.

Okay, when we reached the fair we noticed that it is a totally different feeling to cosplay in a regular fair compared to a cosplay convention. Those STARES and glances!! Everyone was staring at us. Some older people were totally scared and children were running away. But it was totally worth it! Buaha!

After our show and work we wandered around those huge fair halls and found many interesting places!

The first interesting place was... Rovaniemi, Lapland!
Shufu and Rimppu found this really cool big BUBBLE full of fake snow!
(It was mostly for children but we scared 'em away with our spooky costumes.)

Then some organizer popped out and DIDN'T LET ME IN! ;_;
She said that I WAS TOO POINTY AND SHARP with my armors and lances... *sad face*



You can see how these little children... I mean Rimppu and Shufu are enjoying their fake snow (while I was crying outside)! Blah. I also thought about poking a hole in the bubble with my lance. But I managed to calm my mind. You know why?

Because I found a PORSCHE! *__* Look at that porsche!

Now look back to me! NOW LOOK AT THAT PORSCHE!

...

Well, the trip continues! We said goodbye to Lapland. And as you can see, Rimppu was a feeling a bit sad. Derp she says in this photo below.

But then we rented a caravan! (The fair area was too wide to walk)

We had a little toilet break in a place where carpets were red and people were talking about tango! Don't ask.

Well, after that we jumped on a boat and had a nice cabin with a sea view!

Sea on the left! Nice view. Ah, and those two weird smiling faces up in the middle of the photo, just above us. They are outside the boat, ah! Wait, what?

After the boat trip we spent the evening in the streets of Switzerland, or where was it?

Shufu and Rimppu were giggling under a street lamp. How sweet!

Later Rimppu and Majo had a lovely evening in a local restaurant. Already forgot the country which we were in. Because we were walking so fast. Huh. Maybe Estonia?

Whole weekend went fast, and at Sunday evening we were totally tired. We had a quick meal and then I had to drive back home to Jyväskylä (something over 300km).

Maybe next year we will see even more cosplayers in the travel fair!

Here is a little video of the whole weekend! (by our amazing video editor Rimppu).

Enjoy!

Tattoos and cosplay - do you cover yours up?

Having very visible tattoos and doing cosplay can be a pain in the ass for some people.

I have a visible tattoo on the inside of my right arms bicep, and being true to the character, I wanted to cover it up. Many people probably want to present the character as close to the original as possible. So what do you think about this?

GRIMAS cake make-up

For me personally, I try to do the above, and cover my tattoo up with product. Currently I'm using products from GRIMAS to do so, which is okay, but other products are out there for people to grab.

Kat von D make-up concealer

 

Do you have a product that you can vouch for? Please tell us!

DesuCon Frostbite con report

Going to DesuCon Frostbite in Finland

The convention was one the 14-15th of January, so Stine and I took off from the airport in Copenhagen (Denmark) early in the evening the friday before the con.

Bags were packed with our cosplays earlier that day. We brought our Mononoke / Ayakashi costumes to bring them out more since they only have been shown in Denmark and in the UK (The costumes were originally created for the WCS preliminaries in Denmark back in 2009).

This was our second Finnish convention since TraCon last year. For DesuCon I (Casper) was asked to be a hallway cosplayjudge (link/picture) by their cosplay organizer Heidi. So I couldn't refuse to go to DesuCon, and at the same time go see some friends (also having some drinks and going out). In the confusion, they thought Stine was going to participate as a judge as well, so we were going to judge as a team.

The flight to Finland went rather smooth besides the delay, which you always can expect. Never the less, we got to Helsinki Airport and took the bus outside the terminal, after looking for snacks in the supermarket in the terminal.

Five frozen toes later, we entered the bus and looked at the frozen stuff outside.

When we got to our hotel, as friend of mine that came earlier that day texted me that we should join him and his friend Daniel from Sweeden around 11 PM for some drinks, which we did. We returned back at the hotel at 2AM to sleep.

Saturday

I woke up at 6 in the morning to shave for cosplay, and Stine and I joined Allan and Nadia for breakfast in the hotel dining hall at 7AM.

The breakfast this lovely morning was spent with some of the lovely organizers from the Danish convention Genki (Allan and Nadia). 30 minutes later, we headed back to our room and put on our make-up and costumes. Seven hours and a couple of squaremeters of paint later, we went to the convention and meet the other judges in the info stand.

Short after, we received our awesome Vip badges and got to our judging room to judge the hallway cosplay costumes. The competition was based on staff member selecting the best costumes on saturday, and then make a panel of cosplayers (us) select three persons as the best of the lot. The selection of cosplayers ranged from big costumes that litteraly didn't fit in the judging room, to petite costumes with small fine details. It was very nice judging them since we got a pleasent amount of time to judge and talk about the costumes afterwards.

After the juding of the costumes, the cosplayers were presented in the theater hall together with Frost-chan's selected cosplayers on stage. The theater hall was pretty cool since it had three levels of balchonies.

Around 7pm, we announced the winners on stage. The 1st  place, went to Himeko from the game Ookami. The 2nd place went to Death Master from Black Rock Shooter and the 3rd place to Gilgamesh from Fate series.

Afterward we got to go around and look at convention center, but short after we went back to change into ourselves again to go out and party with our Finnish friends.

Sunday

In the morning, we woke up at 8am and Joined Iris Rönkkö and Arttu Seppi in the dinning hall for breakfast. When the time passed 10am, we took a cab to the convention venue. Just after comming to the place, we went into the Dealers room and tried to scout some new manga, which failed, do to lack of manga that is not mainstream.

Later around noon, we ran into Allan and Nadia, who had been to serveal convention related meetings till early in the morning.

Allan dragged us into a meeting with some con organizers and cosplay representatives hosted by Daniel Ulis from NärCon (Sweeden). The meeting conserned a newly project known unofficially as NCC (Nordic Cosplay Championship). The meeting contained a lot of 'nice to know', about the plans of creating a bond between the Nordic conventions with cosplay.

Time for lunch - We received some eating tickets from the staff and went off to the restaurant in the venue.

Then the ending ceremoni came up and Daniel and Allan was asked to go on stage and present their conventions and talk about stuff.

After the ending ceremony, we retired to the Green room to talk to people. About two hours later, we went to the airport to go back to Denmark.

Info

The venue / location of the convention

The convention hall that DesuCon chose was very easy to get to. The travel to Lathi, where the convention is, is about 1 hour and 20 minutes from the airport by bus. So for foreigners it's very easy to trabel to.

The venue is pretty big, and can hold a large amount of people. Even though there are many people, it's easy to move about and take pictures of the cosplayers. You don't get to feel claustrofobic since the convention center is in 5 floors and has a big theater hall with many rooms backstage for the cosplayers to access.

Acompanying the name 'Frostbite' the snow of Finland gets quickly to your toes. But the cold substance also was very nice and many people planned photoshoots around and about.



The cosplay show


DesuCon Frostbite doesn't have an act based cosplayshow but in craftmanship. The show was just a quick walk-on, to show the audience the selection of cosplayers that were handpicked by the staff, also including Frost-chan's favorites (cosplayers picked by the mascot Frost-chan to go to the stage). The show was pretty digestible, and it was easy to see who the audience prefered among the selected cosplayers.

DesuCon Frostbite reached the local Finnish paper!

Nordic Travel Fair - Helsinki

This weekend me (Elffi), Shufu, Majo and Rimppu (WCS 2012 representatives of Finland) are going to work on MATKA 2012 Nordic Travel Fair in Helsinki. It is the biggest travel fair in Northern Europe. In 2010 over 81,500 professionals and consumers visited the fair. There was over 1,200 exhibitors. It's a huge convention with many different countries all over the world! Last year, 2011, there was approximately 100,000 visitors in the fair.

The fair is mostly offering useful information on new unknown destinations all over the world. It's the main event in Northern Europe for travel industry, and there is a LOT of worldwide known airlines participating. It's an excellent forum for countries, travel agencies and other companies to show their products and meet new partners. 

The four of us are going to work on the Japan booth for the weekend. We are all cosplayers and we are going to hold a little representation of cosplay. People in the fair are not so familiar with cosplay, so we are going to introduce history of cosplay in Finland and worldwide. After that there is a little cosplay skit with music. I hope we will meet some people from Japan also, because I wanna discuss things in Japanese.

We have a camera with us and we are going to check out all the booths from different countries to make some new friends and to promote cosplay! And of course we are going to take a lot of photos! Hope you enjoy our forthcoming blog post! 

I can already see all the scared faces of the NORMAL people when they see COSPLAYERS in the fair ;D (and I'm not even wearing a shirt!)