The most prestigious gathering and competition among cosplayers in the world is set every year at the World Cosplay Summit (WCS) in Nagoya, Japan. For 2014 there will be 25 participating nations with 20 competing for the World Cosplay Championship. Observer nations include the Philippines, Hongkong, Vietnam, Taiwan and Portugal. Official countries participating in WCS 2014 are Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Malaysia, Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan. Each team can have 2 cosplayers coming to Japan.
WCS Finals in the Philippines was held during the 13th Toys and Hobbies Collectible Convention at SM Megatrade Hall and 5 finalists compete to represent the country in Nagoya, Japan. The finalists are not only cosplayers but they are also certified crafters. WCS rules seem to state that the competitors should also be the one making the costume that they will use for the competition.
The finals features two regions, finalists from NCR and finalists from Mindanao, Davao specifically. There were 3 finalists from NCR and 2 from Davao. Objectively speaking all of the finalists was indeed good and ca be congratulated for their effort, however, the totality of craftsmanship and performance had to be given hands down to the two finalists from Davao.
I always believe that cosplay should be a mixture of costume, characterization and performance. It does not matter if the costume is armor, mecha or just plain cloth as long as you can see the character itself in that cosplay. Of course, the more difficult the costume and the character are the more awesome that cosplay would be.
As the results ere announced, Sora No Katsuo , the team from Davao, won the World Cosplay Summit Philippine Finals and they will be the official representative to represent the Philippines this year. This team is the runner-up team from the WCS Mindanao Conference and is composed of Angeleah Mejo & Matsu Bernales; and they are cosplaying Alisa Bosconovitch and Yoshimitsu from Tekken, respectively.
The target this year is to make the WCS Committee notice our representatives and our performance so that by 2015 we will be a competing nation. This means that the team from the Philippines needs to impress not only the judges but the organizers as well.
Based on the participants during this years finals, we can say that costumes are greatly improved and each finalist really exerted an effort. I can personally say that when it comes to the costumes the team from Manila composed of Erica Garbin and her partner plus the 2 teams from Davao are on the upper edge. The factor which separated them perhaps is the level of performance of the winning team.
I was just wondering whether the preliminaries also apply the judging strategy used in the actual WCS Championship.
“The WCS Championship is a competition that rewards both the ability to make costumes and perform on stage. There are two types of judges: celebrity judges, who mark the stage performances, and international judges, who mark the craftsmanship of the costume.
The celebrity judges each award 10 points for performance, 5 points for Faithfulness to story and characters, and 5 points for the costume impact on stage; 20 points in total. There are usually five celebrity judges, resulting in a total mark of 100 points.
The craftsmanship judges panel awards 100 points. This number is then multiplied by the number of celebrity judges, and then divided by 10 to make the score compatible with the marks of the celebrity judges. If there are five celebrity judges, this brings the total mark for craftsmanship to 50 points.”
For more information about WCS you can visit their official website.
Now, we pause and think about certain things. Is there a point where their costumes are judged and scrutinized? How are their costumes judged? When was it done? The WCS Finals has separate judges for performance and costume, so I suppose in order to really prepare us for this international competition, we can also adapt the same rules.
Anime Alliance had put up a lot of effort in order to elevate our cosplay to the WCS level and they should really be congratulated for that. The task now of those who are attending the WCS in Japan, as what the organizers said is to share the knowledge they acquire to the community so that we will all grow together and elevate our competitiveness for WCS. However, if these learning are not shared for the purpose of keeping the edge to themselves then we would say that our participation to WCS is not only defeated but also hampered.
We also need more finalists to represent not only NCR and Mindanao or Davao but also the whole Philippines specifically key region clusters like North Luzon, South Luzon, Bicol Region and Visayas. This would elevate the level of competition and create a sense of unity among all cosplayers.
In closing, I think it is about time that the community lend a hand in helping our WCS representative and the process, after all this is not only for a single organizations glory but also for the benefit of our country as a whole.
Good luck to Team Sora No Katsuo in their journey to WCS 2014 at Nagoya, Japan. For more information on WCS Philippines please visit their official website or Facebook page.
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