Truth or Dare with the Dark Side
Michael (Lord Dominus) helped us with a video a bit before we were fully ready, he was super patient and was showing his Jedi side (he owns a Jedi Academy, the San Carlos Jedi Academy)
I want to share a bit of the behind the scenes of getting to the point of filming this video though.
So we were on our way to Wondercon and my brain had been thinking through all of our convention recordings. I was pretty stressed out because I really felt like we weren’t doing our best, almost like we had half an idea. Essentially, at the previous conventions, we’d stake out an out of the way place, setup our equipment, and then pull people towards us to record. Then…well we’d just hit record. We knew people responded to SquirrelGirl LV, and we knew there were a lot of cosplayers happy to help record YouTube videos…but that was it.
There are generally so many tons of cosplayers, that getting someone to come over and help us record something isn’t that difficult. No, what was stressing me out was that I felt like we were doing a disservice to our channel and to the cosplayers by not making the videos more entertaining to a wider audience.
If you’ve watched (and hopefully enjoyed) some of our videos, you might notice a difference between them and some other popular YouTube videos of cosplayers. First, we don’t fixate just on sexy women. Not that we have anything against sexy women, but our intention was originally to fixate on “cosplay”, not the sexy women. So instead we fixated mostly on people whose cosplay interested us or seemed like they had a good personality.
This was great, and I’m still proud of getting some exposure to people who might not otherwise make it to a video or photo shoot, people who are doing awesome things but aren’t being sexy so might be ignored.
BUT, honestly unless you follow the cosplayers we recorded or are interested in being a cosplayer yourself, most of the videos we recorded are a bit too fixated on the “behind the cosplay”, things like how their costume was made or what its like to be a cosplayer. Those are great, but they really limit their audience to a very small niche.
So there I was, driving to Wondercon from Vegas, worried that we were going to create a bunch more videos who only a very small number of people would appreciate, when I decided to do more structured activities. I came up with the Truth or Dare while Lydon tossed in Thumb Wrestling. We took both of those ideas and filmed them and there you go, thats where the last few cosplayer videos we did come from. This was just the beginning, we’re going to do a lot more, and we’re going to try and get some tips and tricks too to stay true to our focus on cosplay not just the people who show the most skin. ;)
We’re still making videos with all kinds of cosplayers, but now we’re having a bit more fun and hopefully that “fun” is making it into our videos and consequentially you can vicariously appreciate some of the zaniness.
I’d really love to hear from some people who have watched both of our types of videos. Also any comments on things you think we could improve in the video in terms of color, lighting, or sound would be greatly appreciated. Bill from B Squared photography really helped me with the audio (this video was the first of some of my new techniques, I really dialed it in by the time of the later videos which is why I posted a couple of the better ones first).
