Recently I’ve noticed loads of
new pages popping up for cosplayers, now before I go any further I can already
hear you all shouting ‘Matt, you hypocrite, you have a cosplay page yourself’,
yes, yes I do, but give me a moment...
Anyway cosplay pages, I have
no objection, in fact if people want to have one I’d actively encourage it,
however... before you run to Facebook to set up your page stop and think for a
moment, why am I setting one up?
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| Good ol' Facebook |
Reasons to have a page:
- You want to have a public profile that anyone can see – This is why I ended up with a page, I didn’t actually set my page up, it was done by my girlfriend at the time following on from an off the cuff comment of ‘I keep getting friend requests, I should have a fan page!’. Anyway, my plan way to have a profile that I could share all my Doctor Who related things on without it taking over my profile, not all my friends have the same interests as me so I’d feel bad spamming them with one topic, plus it also meant that I could keep my private profile, well, private, I’m not interested in how many friends I have on FB, I’d rather have 10 that are my best mates than have 1,000 that I don’t know because let’s face it who really wants to look at my random photo’s from years back?
- You’re a professional – Says it all really, if you’re a professional cosplayer (Jessica Nigri springs to mind) then a page makes perfect sense
- It’s part of an integrated social media strategy – If you’ve already got websites etc then a FB page makes sense.
Reason not to have a page:
- Everyone else has one – says it all really...
- It’s an ego trip – A page should have a purpose not just be a boost for your ego, no really!
- Why not? – Sigh...
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| It's not just Doctor Who and more... |
Page names...
One thing I wish I could
change is the name of my page, when it first started Matt Holden 10th
Doctor Extraordinaire was fine (I thought I was only going to get about 20
likes anyway), but two plus years down the line it’s grown and is more than
just Doctor Who, it’s a mix of lots of things, plus I think the word Extraordinaire
is a bit much...
If you’re going to call
yourself a lookalike please make sure you actually are... And when I say ‘are’
I mean really are. People in the past have said ‘but you don’t look like him’
however having done paid work to portray that character I feel I’ve earned the
right to use the word lookalike if I feel the need...
Final thing on page names,
what is it with everyone referring to themselves as ‘unofficial’? I’ve never
heard of an official cosplayer? Just call yourself a cosplayer, cos that’s what
you are...
Content...
If you have a page it’s up to
you what you put on there, all I would say is keep it fun and keep it
interesting. If you do then people will like you and take an interest in what
you do, let’s face it if you have a page you want people to look at it and like
it because who really wants a page with 20 likes that are all fb friends?
Anyway that’s enough of me
talking about pages, normal service will now resume...
I think that people get Official and Unofficial mixed up with Professional in their minds, if you are hired to portray your characters cosplay then that is a whole different ball game to doing it as an expensive and time consuming hobby, most cosplayers are doing it to show their creativity and take pride in getting the costumes up to SA (screen accurate).
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you say, someone doing it (really badly in my case) for fun should not get a page. Those like Rebecca, Lisa, Tors, Richard, yourself and Matt who go above and beyond sanity in some cases or who actually are lookalikes and amazingly close lookalikes in Matts case should get a page if they want as the amount of people can overwhelm a normal facebook page.
Matt you are flawless ad a great lookalike. All the work you have done definitely warrants that you can call yourself a lookalike and doubting this is ridiculous. I always though that the title of your page was meant to be a bit ironic or something, like it was over the top in a sort of 'I don't think I need a fan page but other people think I do!' way because I don't think you've got a big ego, well at least not just in an adorable way!
ReplyDeleteAwww I may be many things but I'm not flawless :)
DeleteAbsolutely there's a difference between professional and just the average good cosplayer. Agreed the professionals should have those dedicated pages for fans. The average good cosplayer can always get involved on a community cosplay support page that spans all characters and genres. Lets face it, running a page, making it interesting and fun does take some work. That alone separates the herd. Perhaps "unofficial" is just another way of saying "rogue", aka : the character is mine to play with, I am not the character?
ReplyDeleteI used the term "Unofficial" on the one I created for Richard, as it refers to the fact that neither Richard himself nor the rest of us are in any way endorsed by the BBC or the actors we portray. Official lookalikes are those linked with the producers or celebrities in some way. I think a lot of people do just go with the "unofficial" badge simply because they are copying the "unofficial lookalike" title but have been made aware that they look nothing like the character they are dressing as. I've even seen one or two create a page by pretty much copy-pasting paragraphs from other peoples' pages. Just lazy thinking really in a lot of cases.
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