Participants are invited to experience in costume.

It can be built in a closed space, like a store in a shopping mall, to give participants an intensive experience. It can also be set up in different spot of a convention space, to drive participants to go to different places to explore the whole experience.

NO.1 Facial Expression Challenge aims to make participants put on different facial expressions according to the character they are in.

   

NO.2 Fantasy Action immerses participants into the fantasy world with their body movement. The better they perform, the closer they are to magic.

2.5SPACE Fantasy Action Probe (CCA MFA Thesis 2012) from April He on Vimeo.

These first two parts are warm-up exercise for the third part, Moving Comics. One inspires related condition or situation for characters with emotion trigger. Another helps them start to build impressions and have ideas of how a character is framed in a media, such as manga and anime frames.

NO.3 Moving Comic, a hybrid of a comic book page and a moving image, is the real fun time, and to challenge cosplayers if they meet the essence of Cosplay, "be in the character," be fully immersed themselves in the character. It's time to act.

Samples of Moving Comic composed during prototype testing:

Moving Comic: Girl Who Leapt Though Time ( April He CCA MFA Thesis 2012) from April He on Vimeo.		Moving Comic: Bunny Hero ( April He CCA MFA Thesis 2012) from April He on Vimeo.
Moving Comic: Little Alice in Wonderland ( April He CCA MFA Thesis 2012) from April He on Vimeo.		Moving Comic: Eric as Mr Rabbit in Wonderland (CCA MFA Thesis 2012) from April He on Vimeo.

How to compose these Moving Comics?

Here are the preliminary user interfaces, which I envision the process of creating Moving Comics. This is aimed to ease the editing process, making more people to be able to create their own Moving Comic, and attracting more participants.

1. Users drew a very draft storyboard quickly, rehears it, whenever requires camera changes to tell the idea, a new frame is suggested. If an event or action needs two different point of view to tell the idea, or, two or more things happen at the same time, the storyboard will need to be drawn parallel to each others.

2. Scanned the storyboard.

3. Drag and drop the story boxes, make your own decision. [add on dragging graphic direction and behavior text]

4. The Frame View in the UI automatically resize and adjust the story boxes to fits with the comic spread.

5. Shoot the video according to the Rehearsal View, camera doesn't move until one frame is done.

6. After shooting, drag the footage down

7. Edit footage length or cut out not-needed parts, set zoom in or out to fit the comic frame

8. matches backgrounds, adds effects

More about this project:

Chair of CCA Grad Design: Brenda Laurel

Thesis advisor: Scott L. Minneman

Secondary advisor: Rachel Strickland, Long Jiao

Thesis writing advisor: Leslie Carol Roberts

Special thanks to, my cosplay friends and community, my writing coach Calder Yates, my family