Swoop - Animated

[Lunatron]

I wore him to BotCon 2012!

Before I left, I decided to do a photoshot in natural lighting, Unfortunately, the sun was setting, so it was pretty dark outside:






Then, at the Hyatt, we wanted to do a photo shoot on the third floor observation deck. It was windy, and I basically have two kites strapped to my back, so we ran back inside quickly after not taking many pictures:






Swoop with the puggles Jeffrey and Winterfresh, which were made by the talented Cally Kari Shokka:




Swoop having some chocolate pudding with citrus cream in the Centennial Cafe. One of the waiters was awesome and imitated Grimlock:


Swoop was made out of a lot of two-way spandex, and this is when I discovered that two-way spandex is annoying. Only the black and the gold fabric are four-way spandex. He's mostly fabric and fabric over foam. The gloves were made from scratch. I learned about fusible webbing after I had made about 75% of him and wished I had experimented with it sooner. The Animated Autobot symbol was made by me on the computer and then printed onto iron-on fabric and then iron on before I attached the fabric to the foam. The wings were a Wicked Wings kit that I carefully took apart and then reassembled with my own slipcovers, so the wings could open and close. The helmet was made out of foamcore, hot glue, duct tape, paper clay, craft foam, fabric, sunglass lenses, and acryliic paint. My face paint was Ben Nye Lumiere Luxe Powder Silver with a bit of eyeshadow for Swoop's facial lines. I used black lipstick under silver for the lips. I had on five inch heels underneath my 'boots', because Swoop is pretty darn tall and I needed the extra height, but I could still stand on one foot. The pockets worked. The thermal morningstar was medical foam, puff paint, dowel rod, swivel hooks, chain, craft foam, Styrofoam, fluorescent spray paint, black craft paint, hot glue, and fabric. I should have covered the Styrofoam with glue before painting it, but I forgot. I brought a back-up plastic chain in case the metal chain was not acceptable for whatever reason, but the metal chain seemed to be fine, so I never used the plastic chain. The boots used the first zippers I have ever sewn. In the future, I would like to use zippers more often.

He has problems with being wrinkly and with stuff coming untucked. Also, I sort of had to adjust his character model slightly in order to have working wings in robot mode.

[MiraiBaby]

GAWD this one was fun to see at BotCon!

The wings were awesome. Was it easy to tear apart the store-bought ones? I've been thinking of doing so just for fun. It took me, like, a day and a half to realize you actually had fangs too. Missed it the first handful of times I saw you!

[Lunatron]

Aww, thank you!

The store bought ones had a bit of hot glue holding the covers down, but I was able to carefully remove that to remove the slipcovers intact. The main issue was that I had to take the cords and handles off before I could remove the slipcovers and then I had to re-thread them - I recommend using a spool of wire to help re-thread them, personally, because the cord tends to catch on stuff in the tubes and gets stuck. Also, be sure to retie the knots tightly and maybe enlarge the knots with a bit of hot glue or a bead or something to prevent the cords from falling out because then you would need to re-thread them all over again, and that is a pain. If you have to remove the screws, be sure to put them back in snugly, because the screws can mysteriously vanish on you. I photographed what I was doing at every step to make sure I could keep track of what went where (and now have no idea where the photographs are, whoops).

So I suppose I would say it is more tedious than hard?

Yeah, I had fangs. As far as I can tell, Swoop never opens his robot mode mouth, so fangs are as good a guess as anything, given that he's a Dinobot and all. They're just fangs that I bought at a Halloween store and secure with denture adhesive.

[keyismykitty]

Swoop! O: Your costume was crazy awesome. We saw you come in, and we were like "WOAH. She just blew us out of the water." XD

Congrats on winning the costume contest, by the way. Or, you know, being one of three winners.

[Lunatron]

Thank you, too!

This is just a bit of philosophical rambling, but I tend to mentally consider human Transformer costumes and full mecha softies/rigs in different categories, and I generally don't compare them. Is a bicycle better than a car? It really depends what you're trying to do! A human Transformer costume might require a lot of thought and initial design work to distill the essence of the character into a simplified format that reads as a coherent human clothing outfit. A full softie/rig might require staying up all night for a month with 500 sticks of hot glue. The whole design and creation process is different.

If I was in charge of a Transformers costume contest, I'd put human Transformers and human sidekicks into one judging category and full mecha softies/rigs in different categories and have them judged separately, just because I do feel it is like trying to compare a bicycle to a car: it does not work very well. Sure, you can say that Mecha A has better workmanship than Human B or Human C has better workmanship than Mecha D, but maybe Mecha D was using more difficult build techniques than Human C, and do you factor that in, too?

Rambling. Eh-heh.

[XLR8]

Hi I was TFA Prowl at this year’s Botcon and I must say I was blown away by your costume, while not in costume I must have taken 10 or 20 pictures of you . Besides prowl and blurr, swoop is one of my favs, so I glad I got to see it in person. In the first picture you have it looks like your eyes are glowing is that just a reflection or did I completely miss that at the convention?

I also wanted to congratulate you on winning the contest, it was a well deserved win and I was very happy to lose to who I did lose to , I honestly would have picked the same costumes to win,