Build Books, Folios and Reference Images
I was recently in the Australian round of the Cosplay Central Crown Championships of Cosplay held at PAX AU. There is a lot that can be said about how this event was organised, but what I want to think about today is their requirement for hard copy reference and progress images to be submitted during the judging.
In the acceptance email we were told that:
Construction or progress pictures should be brought by the entrant to their judging session; not supplied electronically.
There was no formatting requirements or guidelines supplied. From looking around the room, the hard copy progress pictures ranged from small booklets for each judge to large display folios.
For context, I am a working academic which means that a lot of my job involves writing assessment criteria and rubrics across a range of disciplines (since moving to my current university, I have taught into the Japanese language programme, the English and Creative Writing programme, Gender Studies, and 3rd and 4th year Research courses). This lack of guidance is teeth gnashingly infuriating. JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT.
In full disclosure, I am also predominately a skit cosplayer, having competed several times in the former Madman National Cosplay Championships and the Australian World Cosplay Summit preliminaries since 2012, so I have seen how folios and ‘build books’ have developed in the Australian cosplay scene from that perspective.
My early submissions were grounded in research and incredibly wordy with few images. Recently, I feel like I have finally found the happy balance between enough pictures, the righ amount of copy/descriptive words, an attractive document, and something that tells the judges enough, without expecting them to read a 10,000 word thesis (If you find yourself writing 10,000 word theses in your progress documents though, academia might be for you! Talk to me about Honours or my PhD project – details here).
To my mind there are three main types of reference/progress document – regardless of what the competition calls it
Progress images submitted as part of the application process (as per WCS preliminaries)
Progress images provided on the day during judging (solicited)
Progress images provided on the day during judging (unsolicited)
I am still not 100% confident that this is the CORRECT way to write a build book, but I also wanted to share these in case others find them helpful or interesting.
After years of writing these things in MS Word or Google Docs, I am now using PowerPoint/Google Slides (the advantage of Google Slides is that you can share the workload with any partners or group members).
The formatting and image quality in some of the following PDFs is off as I had to reformat them from an A5 booklet printing layout to an A4 single page format – so please takt that into consideration.
These books were created for an Australian cosplay context – it is important to be aware that there are differences in the way that cosplay competitions are run, even within Anglophone spaces. When in doubt, talk to your show runner!!
This document was submitted as part of the application process using the template and guide provided by WCS Australia – see their website https://www.wcsaustralia.com.au/
Princess Emeraude and Zagato from Magic Knight Rayearth
This document was printed as a full colour A5 booklet, with one booklet provided for each judge. I wanted to provide enough information that would be easy for the judges to digest without being overwhelming. Could this have worked against me? Quite possibly. However, as no formatting advice or guidelines were given by the competition, this should not be the case.
Fearne Calloway from Critical Role – Campaign 3
This document was printed as a full colour A5 booklet, with one booklet for each judge. The competition did not call for any hard copy reference images, but I wanted to give the judges a hard copy of the history of the garments I no doubt info-dumped at them during judging.
Sesshomaru from Inuyasha - see also this journal article on these costumes.
