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 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!
