So, last year I went to the MCM Expo (Comic Con) in Birmingham UK as Anthony’s Brother, Richard from the film Dead Man’s Shoes. I scoured ebay for a Russian GP5 Gas Mask and a military style M65 Jacket to enable me to become this intense and murderous anti-hero played in the film by Paddy Considine. If you’ve never seen it I’d recommend it as a great British film, funny, moving and cringeworthy at different points.
Anyway, this is what I looked like having my photo taken with someone cosplaying as Jay from Kevin Smith’s Jay & Silent Bob fame.
As you can see I also had to fabricate an axe that I
could take with me into the comic con. Apparently they don’t let you carry real hatchets for some reason. This was made from an axe handle with a cardboard head created by using aluminum tape and spray paint.
Only about five people spotted who I was cosplaying as with one guy even showing me a forearm tattoo of a gas mask clad Anthony’s brother. Awesome!
I enjoyed the experience of cosplaying and having pictures taken whilst still being a bit mysterious and creepy. Not much different from all of my usual photos then…
The New Build
Thinking about it some more over the year since then I had an idea to cosplay as a character from the Robocop movie. Now I love the 1987 movie, but was released as I was a fourteen year old schoolboy with another four years to wait until I was legally allowed to watch it. Somehow in the same year it was released someone gave me a VHS copy of this movie, it was the first pirate movie I’d ever seen and was amazed that you could actually get them like this. I decorated the cardboard slip with pictures cut from Crash magazine that was advertising the Spectrum game and this was a firm favourite film. With all the blood, gore, language, guns and violence, why wouldn’t a fourteen year old lad enjoy it?
I’ve seen it many times since and own it on Blu-Ray, DVD and probably still have the pirate VHS somewhere too. The stop motion of the ED-209 robot and the brilliant matte paintings still make me smile when I see it and if it’s on TV I still have to stay up to watch the end, even if I’ve missed most of it and I have it advert free upstairs on my shelves.
The idea germinated to create an ED-209 costume after one of these late night watchings and it reminded me of a fantastic AT-AT Cosplay I’d seen at the Birmingham Comic Con previous time. I figured that if they could do that, why couldn’t I do an ED-209?
The concept bounced around in my head for some months and when my kids decided that they’d like to go to the Comic Con this November I thought I’d aim for that. The build proper started in mid-September a solid two months or more to prepare this beast.
See the next post for details of how the build began and how I documented my ideas…
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