Before you get started

By this point you’ll have:

- Picked out characters that speak to you (or at the very least their costume design does) that you would be okay with cosplaying

- Organized your cosplays by some criteria, recommend organizing by traits that can drastically change how you end up executing the cosplay. For me it’s easy, difficult, and competitive.

- The cosplays are prioritized based on characteristics that define what makes that cosplay important to you. For me it’s comfort and how the character fits in in terms of recognition and how likely that cosplay is to be worn by someone else at the same con.

Now you need to figure out WHEN you’re going to work on all these….

Step 1: Figure out what your cosplay needs are for the next year

Why a year?

Because it works for me. I’ve found that if I try to figure out what cosplays I will be wearing in 2 years, 3 years, or as little as 18 months, I always end up switching before I get to making them. Rather than worry about locking myself in to a cosplay that I might not want to do in a year or constantly flip-flopping, I just schedule as I need to.

Also, since any particular con only happens once a year, you can figure out how many and what type of cosplay you’ll need for the conventions.

This does not include costumes that might take multiple years to make. That’s an entirely different box of threads that I’ll write about another time.

So what are cosplay needs?

Figure out which cons you’re going to and what photoshoots or events that you’ll be attending (if they’re scheduled). Then list all of the cosplays you’ll need for those events. For example, let’s take a look at my 2012-2013 needs.

I generally scope my year from spring to spring because the main convention I attend is Anime Boston. These were my cosplay needs for spring 2012 through spring 2013:

• 1 Halloween costume
• 1 competitive outfit for Hall Cosplay
• 1 costume for my husband for the weekend of AB 13
• 1 costume for me for the weekend of AB 13
• 2 costumes for cosplay games at AB 13

You might need multiple costumes for multiple conventions, but the same principles listed below will apply.

Step 2: Refine your cosplay needs with any restrictions

For each costume, determine if there are any restrictions on what the outfit can be. If you’re going as part of a group to an event, make sure to take that into consideration. Also make a note of the time of year your conventions are. If you’re going to a summer con, it may not be the best idea to make that giant ballgown, so keep that in mind.

• Halloween costume – needs to be work appropriate and somewhat resilient to New England fall weather
• Competitive cosplay outfit – this year I’m going as a group, so my costume will need to be from the same series as the rest of the group members, plus it must be a competitive outfit
• Husband AB 13 outfit – this can be difficult or easy, but needs to be solid enough that he can rock it on is own
• My AB 13 outfit – can be easy because I’m already making a competitive outfit for AB 13
• 2 outfits for cosplay games -should try to fit the theme of AB 2013 (“Tales of Youkai”)

Step 3: Figure out what you already have and can reuse

To those of us with little time on our hands to make cosplays, taking an existing outfit and making some minor changes/repairs can save time, money, and sanity. As much as I would love to make a new costume for each outfit I needed, I don’t have that kind of time and money.

In this case, the outfits for the cosplay games can be found in my closet since I’ve already done pair cosplays with my husband of demon characters. I just need to make a note if anything needs to be repaired.

• Cosplay game outfits: Re-use Jin and Touya, but allow time for new wig(s) and minor prop/accessory fixes

Everything else can be new creations!

Step 4: Figure out what you CAN make

Real life can be annoying, but it always takes precedence over cosplay. As much as you might want to make 10 new cosplays, you need to be realistic. Do you have time to do that while working a full time job? Do you have money to make all those outfits if you’re still in school?

Do not put yourself into a position where you do not have money to live your regular life and where you let your enthusiasm for cosplay affect your work or school performance. Only you can determine what your bandwidth is, but be smart about it.

In this case, I generally find that 1 competitive, 1-2 difficult, and 1 easy costume are what I can handle. (Although I am getting faster and getting better work compensation, so those numbers might increase). Luckily, that matches up quite nicely with my cosplay needs (well, not entirely luckily, I do base my cosplay needs somewhat around what my bandwidth is).

If you find yourself without the time or money to make all of the outfits that you as ‘new creations’ in Step 3, you may want to revisit Step 3. See what you have in your closet that you can fix up or even re-purpose. You might be able to wash and re-use a wig. You might have props that can be repainted to look good as new. Leverage what you have to meet your cosplay needs without going broke/insane.

Step 5: Start matching up costumes from your prioritized lists

The first ones that I look at are always the competitive outfits, because those are the easiest to clear out the way (it’s for a single event, it has the most requirements to meet, and tends to be the most expensive because I want to get things right).

So for 2012-2013, I was going to be a part of a Magic Knight Rayearth group (where it had previously been decided that I would do Emeraude if the group ever came to pass). The other girls in the group were hoping to compete and so I agreed to lead the group and compete with them (which I didn’t have to).

This is why I organize my groups separately; when a group decides that it’s actually going to happen, you know what costume you’re doing for the group and so there’s not much to decide.

Next, I looked at potential pair cosplays for me and my husband to wear at AB 13. Generally I pick pair cosplays that feature characters that he loves because I have other opportunities (Halloween, competition) to make characters that I love. Hisoka from Hunter x Hunter happened to be on the top of the ‘easy’ prioritized list, so we decided to go with that. The pairing for that was Machi.

Finally, the last outfit to pick was for Halloween. I had a costume on the top of my list for Hakuouki, but hadn’t decided which Chizuru outfit to make yet. I decided to go with Chizuru, but I would figure out whether to do her Japanese, western, or geisha outfit a bit closer to Halloween.

Step 6: Breaking Ties

If you have two costumes that could work for a particular event, but you’re not sure which one to go with, there are three ways I use to break ties:

1. Which one is higher priority on your board? You marked it as a higher priority for a reason, follow your prioritization or take another look at your list to see if you need to re-prioritize.
2. Which one is cheaper? Why not save money?
3. Imagine yourself walking around the con (or event) in both outfits. Do you get a better reaction for either? That will usually help you figure out where your heart truly lies.

Next Steps

Hopefully this helped you figure out how to wrestle with scheduling from a list of 20+ cosplays. Next time I’ll cover how to start planning a cosplay before you put needle to fabric.

If you’re still not sure, don’t worry about it! As long as you leave yourself enough time and money to make the outfits, you can delay making a decision until you’re a little closer to the event.

In Sorting Future Cosplays for Scheduling, I covered how to organize your future cosplays into loose categories to help you determine what you should work on. This time I’ll divulge the secrets of maintaining a prioritized list of cosplays, which is an important intermediate step before you get to actually scheduling your cosplays.

What does it mean to maintain a prioritized list?

In this case, it means to put the cosplays from each of your loose categories in order of how much you want the cosplay. Then, frequently check back and update the list as necessary.

Why bother putting the cosplays in order?

Because when the time comes to schedule your cosplays, it can drastically reduce the amount of fretting when making a decision.

This is actually a little secret I learned from my job as a product owner for a software product. As a product owner, it is my responsibility to order all feature requests and bug fixes from lowest to highest priority in a giant list called the backlog. I spend multiple hours a day doing investigation and review just to make sure the backlog stays prioritized.

This preparation is crucial to the development team’s process so they can pull in items from the top of the backlog, knowing that it’s the most important thing for them to work on. This preparation can help you with your cosplay decision making.

For example, let’s say that you have two cosplays that you want to make. Either could work for your schedule/budget/event/travel etc. However, now you’re torn between the two. If you keep a prioritized list you can either a) just pick the one that you already deemed was a higher priority or b) question why you made one a higher priority and in the process actually figure out which costume is more important to you.

So how exactly does one figure out what the priority of cosplays are?

I created a list of traits that I look for when making a cosplay. Generally I use slightly different metrics between my Easy, Difficult, and Competitive outfits because the cost of making the outfit and the situation in which I’ll be wearing the outfit varies drastically.

Let’s first take a stab at ordering my Easy cosplay list first.

For my Easy cosplays, I consider several things:

• Comfort level of the costume
• Fandom level of the character

I like my Easy cosplays to be comfortable to wear for long periods of time, since these are generally costumes that I’ll wear to work, outdoor photo shoots, or to conventions when I’m not in a competitive or difficult outfit.

To determine the comfort level of the costume, I try to ask these questions and keep track of “comfort points” as I go:

• Could I walk in the shoes for multiple hours at a time without break? (yes = +2)
• Is the wig particularly long or heavy? (no = +1)
• Does the costume allow for a full range of motion? (yes = +1)
• Is the costume something I could sit in? Without being careful? (sit/ no worries yes = +2, sit yes = +1)
• Do I need to worry about keeping parts of the costume on to avoid exposure? (no = +1)

Since most of these costumes are either solo cosplays for or pair cosplays with my husband, I also take his comfort level into consideration as well.

Most of the costumes that my husband would be wearing received 7/7 points, but that’s because we tend to ignore costumes that would be extremely uncomfortable. For me, there were a few costumes that only scored “2″ because they had heels (can’t walk in them for a long time), mini-skirts (requires making sure the hem isn’t riding up and have to be careful when sitting), or other uncomfortable elements.

Here are a few of the example scores:

• Buggy (husband): 7
• Kenshin (me): 6, Sano (husband): 6 (white pants require you to be careful)
• Whitey Bay (me): 4 (wig, mini-skirt), Shanks (husband): 7
• Perona (me): 2 (low neckline, impossible skirt, high heels), Zoro (husband): 7

But comfort is only part of the equation. Next I look at the fandom around the character. This is mostly because my husband and I like to stand out. We try to avoid cosplaying from series while they are in the peak of their popularity, but we also don’t want to pick such obscure characters that no one will recognize us.

This leads me to another set of questions to figure out “fandom points”

• Is the character unique in some way, whether either the character or the outfit is not frequently cosplayed? (yes = +1)
• Is the character is recognizable (i.e. is the character wearing clothing that is specific to them and not just a generic ensemble like a suit?) (yes = +1)
• Is the character well known? (within fans of the show = +1, most people = +2)
• Is the character part of a fandom that is over-cosplayed right now? (no = +1)
• Is there a wow factor that might attract attention from non-cosplayers or people outside of anime/video game fans? (yes = +1)
• How big of a fan is the cosplayer of the outfit? (favorite = +2, likeable = +1, indifferent = +0, distaste = -1)

Again, most of the costumes on the list are going to score well because I generally keep these traits in mind when picking potential cosplays. However, sometimes costumes get on the list because I’m a fan of the series or a particular outfit, regardless of how the character fits in with our cosplay goals.

For example, we wanted to cosplay Zaraki and Yachiru, however, we didn’t want to be included in the BLEACH mob a few years ago when shinigami were all over the place. Now that the fandom has died down a bit, Zaraki and Yachiru are more in tune with our cosplay goals.

Here are my final combined comfort and fandom scores for the characters (now in easily prioritized order!):

• Buggy: 7 + 6 (13)
• Yumichika: 7 + 6 (13)
• Yachiru: 7 + 5 (12), Zaraki: 6 + 6 (12) avg. 12
• Shishiwakamaru: 7 + 5 (12)
• Whitey Bay: 4 +4 (8), Shanks: 7 + 7 (14) avg. 11
• Kenshin: 6 + 5 (11), Sano: 6 + 4 (10) avg. 10.5
• Melfina: 2 + 4 (6), Gene: 7 + 6 (13) avg. 9.5
• Perona: 2 + 6 (8), Zoro: 7 + 6 (8) avg. 8
• Baccano female character: 4 + 3 (7), Baccano male character: 7 + 3 (7) avg. 7

For pair cosplays, I usually go with an average of the scores so that it represents the happiness of the entire group. Exceptions are made for extreme discrepancies, particularly if the lower score is a cosplay for my husband.

What about breaking ties?

You don’t need to worry about breaking ties at this point. The next step is to actually start scheduling cosplays to be worked on. Other factors will come into play, such as your needs as a cosplayer (e.g. do you need a pair cosplay from BLEACH?). It’s during the next stage, when you’re stuck between two potential cosplays that could work and then you can refer to the priorities in the list and pick one that you’ve already realized is more important to you.

What about difficult or competitive cosplays?

I follow the same process and criteria for difficult cosplay, just with a different list of costumes. For competitive cosplay, I use a different set of criteria, which I’ll cover in a separate post.

Next steps?

We’ll cover actually scheduling when you’re going to work on which cosplays! See you next time!

I think of all us run into this problem at some point during our time as cosplayers: there are more cosplays that you want to make than you have time for. I’m going to share the technique that I use to help me organize and prioritize my costumes.

OMG! T3h cosplays! Help!

Prerequisite- Find a tool for sorting your costumes

Many people maintain a gallery on Facebook, Deviantart, Flickr, etc. where they post all of their future cosplays. While I find this to be a good way of letting everyone else know what you’re doing, it’s not very practical for creating an organized view of your costumes.

My godsend is an online service called Trello. Trello is a free service that allows you to create lists of cards. Cards can contain checklists, comments, descriptions, and file attachments. If you are an obsessive list-maker like me, I would definitely recommend Trello – not just for cosplay purposes.

Anyway, Trello lets me create a card for each costume, add my reference pictures right onto the card, and also add notes for myself pertaining to the costume.

Here is an example of a Trello card for the Bon Clay character from One Piece:

The best part is that they have a mobile app, so if I need the reference pictures in the store, I can grab them on the go.

The rest of this tutorial will use my cosplay Trello board as an example. You don’t need to use Trello – you can keep track of your costume in notebooks, a gallery, what have you. I just prefer Trello.

Sorting tip #1 – Difficulty of the Cosplay

I chose to organize my costumes by relative difficulty. Costumes that are larger and/or more difficult tend to take longer, cost more, and are the ones that I am most likely going to want to compete in. Since money and time are often driving factors in which cosplays I can actually make at a given time, that’s how I chose to sort my cosplays.

I found that most of my cosplays could be broken into two loose categories: Easy and Difficult.

Easy costumes typically don’t require much research into how to make parts of the costume, could be made for under $100, and represent only a couple weeks of work. So basically, it’s fast, easy, and cheap.

Difficult costumes all required at least some research or some new material/technique to be made. They will probably cost a couple hundred dollars at least and will most likely take a couple months. These are costumes that will challenge me, but making them will help me improve as a cosplayer.

Sorting Tip #2 – Purpose or goal of the cosplay

Next, I broke out costumes that I specifically wanted to do for competitions, so I split apart my difficult costumes into ‘difficult’ and ‘difficult competitive’. The main distinction between ‘challenging’ and ‘competitive’ is that a competitive outfit is a cosplay that I would compete in.

For me, competitive outfits are both challenging and also have many qualities that can be showcased in a competition. Simpler costumes, or costumes with only one difficult piece, have fewer ways to demonstrate your skill, so I try to avoid those for competition.

Separating the competitive pieces is important largely because the possible opportunities for wearing a cosplay in a competition are far fewer than the changes of wearing a cosplay in general. It will be potentially more difficult to schedule these costumes than others.

Aside from competitions there are other types of purposes you might want to keep in mind:

• Do you have costumes that are comfortable that you could wear at cons when you are tired of wearing uncomfortable costumes?
• Are there costumes that you would only wear for a photo shoot because you can’t wear them to cons? (Some cons have strict dress codes that can eliminate some cosplays).
• Are there costumes that you would feel comfortable performing in for a Masquerade, cosplay chess match, or other event where the costume could be damaged?

If you find yourself with a group of costumes that meet a particular need, feel free to sort those into a separate list. This will make it easier later when you’re trying to schedule when to do work on all of these costumes.

Sorting Tip #3 – Group Cosplays

Generally the only group cosplays I have done are with my husband and I end up making both costumes. This means I follow the single cosplayer model, but with two people. (This is why many of the cards you see in the screen shots list two costumes).

However, I have done group cosplays and I already learned that group cosplays are their own separate beast. There are dependencies on other cosplayers, their skill level, and most of all, their availability. For this reason, I put them in their own list.

Next Steps

That’s pretty much all I use for sorting my cosplays. The really challenging part comes when you need to figure out when to actually make them, which I’ll cover next time.