The entertainment business is always growing and inventing new ideas that are in hopes of providing the next big hit on television. Most popular styles of shows, aside from a scripted series, are the real life, competitive, and creative shows which captivate their audience by showing off the skill of the unknown contestants and amazing the them with results that few expected.
Bringing the show business to the geek side of life is a new series called Cosplay Melee which will air on March 21st at 10p EST on the Syfy channel! In this show, contestants will be tasked with a triple play of talent. They must first create a character, including background, story, and name, that could exist within a known world, create the cosplay outfit for their created character, and then BE the character; like an actor!
It seems like a really interesting show and I took the time to speak with one of the contestants that will be featured in the first season running. Let’s see what she had to say about being on the show.
Q&A with Becka Noel
What type of cosplay characters can we expect to see? Any known?
“None. They are original characters, but they were, depending on, what the theme was for the episode, the characters were created in the world of an existing game or pop culture movie, although the original characters are coming from a real universe.”
Did the show provide all the products necessary to create the outfits?
“Everything was provided. There were some tools provided, but I ended up bringing my own from home; some that you can’t get a store and I made myself.”
How did they pick their contestants that are on the show?
“I actually would have never known of the show if it wasn’t for my best friend, Jackie Craft, who is also a contestant. She shared the original casting notice with me and convinced me to apply. I wasn’t going to apply at first thinking there was no way but I also got my fiancé to apply and all three of us ended up on the show.”
Are they still taking contestants?
“No, all the show was recorded in early fall and the whole season was cast back then. They wrapped up filming before the end of the year. Everything has already been cast and everything is already finished. Hopefully there will a second season, which will be a new casting call.”
Do you think the show will last on air?
“Yeah, I think that. I personally feel like this show has really good people behind it and it’s a great topic. Cosplay is something that is getting really popular and wider known, people are interested in it. I think the competition format may go well with cosplay, goes will with the creation process of cosplay rather than the display of following somebody who is in the development. This is like the opposite of Heroes of Cosplay. There’s no drama at all. It’s like watching us freak out and making everything look awesome and looking out for each other.”
That’s interesting. So, even though you were against each other, you all helped each other?
“You always just want to encourage my fellow cosplayers, even though it is a competition.”
After being a part of the show, what part of the show are you most excited to see?
“I am actually really excited to see all the other contestants. Since there were only four of us for each episode, and you didn’t really get to see anybody else filming us, I have only seen what’s in the commercial so far but I would like to see what others made in the same amount of time as I got.”
How long did you get to create the costumes?
“The first challenge where we had to create a piece that would eventually become part of the full costumes. We were only given a few days to make the costume, it wasn’t a lot of time at all.”
When it is time to judge, what are the category’s each contestant will be judged on?
“There weren’t really defined categories, but they had 3 judges that brought different aspects to judge us from. It was a good variety of judges and each had their own thing to look at. But, Christian is pretty intimidating.”
