One of the documentary's most notable participants is Holly Conrad, given the label "The Designer" in film. Holly and her friends go to Comic-Con to enter the annual masquerade competition, but if you think that means something as simple as just dressing up in a costume, think again.
- Image used courtesy of HollyConrad.com
Holly and her friends have built from scratch some incredible outfits based on Mass Effect characters, which are incredibly intricate and detailed. The Commander Shepard costume Holly made for herself is terrific and it's hard not to be stunned by the costume for Grunt, which features working animatronics for the face and seems pretty much movie-ready – and was put together in a garage in San Bernardino, CA.
When I recently spoke to Holly about her work and the experience of being in Comic-Con Episode IV, she recalled her first homemade costume. "I was five years old and I took a green pillow and taped it to my back and I called myself a Koopa Troopa from Mario Bros." She has a degree in medieval studies ("I can read Middle English, if anyone cares," she says with a laugh) and noted, "It helps a lot in costume design knowing about armor. I'm fascinated with armor, so a lot of the designs that I like to come up with on my own are weird, crazy armor things."
Holly recalled that as she grew up, she didn't think primarily about wanting to wear costumes, explaining, "Definitely building [costumes] came first. I never really considered myself a cosplayer. And still, I don't think I'm a traditional cosplayer at all. Because I don't do a bunch of anime costumes. I don't have 50 different sewn outfits that I wear on different days. Since the costumes are so complicated, it takes me a really, really long time to even just visualize what it's going to become."
Her history making costumes for conventions began with, "an utterly abysmal attempt at Steampunk and a D&D character. We all make mistakes!" Still, she said she was hooked after that, going on to make a World of Warcraft Undead Tier Five Warlock for BlizzCon, followed by a "12 foot tall Lady of Pain from [the D&D campaign] Planescape - It was more like a float than a costume."
As for how she came to make the Mass Effect costumes, Holly explained, "I've been a fan of games for ages. I played King's Quest and all the really old ones. Baldur's Gate is still my favorite game of all. I started to play Dragon Age and I wanted to make an ogre for Dragon Age and so I wanted to make [my friend] Tank into an ogre. Because Tank had a big frame and I said, 'I want you to be a big monster for Comic-Con and we're going to be your crew.' But then Mass Effect 2 came out and I told them, 'No, we're not doing Dragon Age. We're doing Mass Effect.' They were kind of disappointed until I said, 'Play the game.' And everyone played the game and everyone agreed it was going to be awesome. I was obsessed with the game completely. I must have played it 15 times."
I've seen Comic-Con Episode IV twice, and each time the audience is blown away by the work on the Grunt costume. Holly told me a lot of it involved she and her friends – some of whom she'd met working at a company who made animatronics for theme parks, while others she met working at a local haunted house attraction – teaching themselves. "Ben [Schwenk], my friend, he'd never done animatronics. He actually taught himself how to do animatronics for the Grunt head. I learned how to figure out foam latex painting and all of that. I sculpted the head and he would come in and say, 'Okay, we need to make this skinfold bigger, because we need the eye to move this way.' It was completely a team effort between all of us. Tank did all the programming. He learned how to program it in the same amount of time."
As for how she came to be in the documentary, Holly (who'd previously had an internship on Titan Maximum, for the Robot Chicken producers) responded to an open casting call after her friends recommended she gave it a shot. The attention she got just from applying to be in the film was huge. As she recalled, "I made a video and hosted it on YouTube and it ended up going viral with the game companies."
She remembered her shock at the flood of emails she suddenly had. "They were all high ups in game companies. They were from Bioware, from all these places. They were really supportive because they knew what kind of effort it took to make this stuff."
Meanwhile, a phone call from Morgan Spurlock let her know she was in the film. She recalls being told that Joss Whedon, upon seeing her video said, "We need to look for people like this," and thinking, "Joss Whedon knows who I am!"
When I asked how she felt about seeing the finished documentary, she exclaimed, "It was just awesome. I loved it! I wasn't worried. With the people involved in the documentary, I knew it wasn't going to be making fun of us. Joss Whedon wouldn't work on a movie where it's making fun of nerds. Those are the people that make him money. I talked to Morgan and he really nice and I just had a good vibe about it through the whole thing."
Since the movie wrapped (it was shot at SDCC 2010), Holly and her friends found themselves actually now creating costumes for the company behind the game that inspired them in the first place. "We ended up making costumes for Bioware for Comic-Con last year. We did another animatronic krogan, we made a Garrus and I think I made a total of three more Shepard suits, which was pretty cool. It was definitely an experience. And then Jessica [Merizan, who is also seen in the documentary] got hired on as their community manager."
There was more – Holly and her friends were then hired to make costumes for the Mass Effect 3 trailer last year and she has a special thanks credit in the game itself, which includes footage of those costumes. "In the beginning when they're talking about how they're losing contact, that whole screen right there is from the live action trailer. That was pretty cool."
I couldn't resist asking Holly about the "controversial" ending to Mass Effect 3, as she noted, "I don't officially work for them. I can say my opinion and it's fine."
"I think everyone has a valid concern about the ending, I really do," she remarked. "I think that it needed more closure. I wanted a Baldur's Gate style ending and that's what I've been saying all along. I wanted an ending that had the same thing. You saw a cut scene. You had the epilogues written up. That was it. And it wasn't that complicated. It's pretty cut and dry. Even Baldur's Gate had different color endings, but you still had closure. You still knew what happened. And I think something like that would have been awesome, just for the fans. I understand the sort of metaphysical, singularity message that was told in the end. I get it. It's cool. But at the same time, I do actually care if my friends are starving on a planet alone, you know?"
She added, "But I think they're going to address it. I'm hoping they do. They tend to listen pretty well to fans, so I'm not too worried about it. I'm not as worried… Everyone's losing their heads over it! And it's really not worth losing your s**t over it."
As for concerns about whether a new ending is betraying the intent of the creators of the game, Holly said she felt, "They can stay true to their vision and still add, 'Hey, here's what happened' to the end, and I think that's probably what going to do, hopefully. They stay true to how they wanted it to end but at the same time… more info! Just a little bit more info. That's all that would make it a little bit better." [As you've probably seen, since this interview was conducted, a Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut Free DLC with an extended ending has been announced.]
Now living in Los Angeles, Holly is currently working freelance, continuing her career as a creature and costume designer. She recently collaborated with James and Se Young (a couple seen in Comic-Con Episode IV) for several live-action shorts with a big video game theme. Though the exact details have to be kept under wraps for now, Holly is excited about the shorts, revealing, "I did production design so I designed all the creatures, I made all the suits. It's going to be awesome." She's also been, "Making my own armor, doing my own stuff on commission, selling stuff online, doing art shows, doing all of that."
As for whether she might be involved in the talked about Mass Effect movie, she said, "I really, really hope so. The Legendary [Entertainment] people have talked to me and they're really nice. If it does happen, I'm pretty sure that they'll try and find some way that I could be involved, which I would love. But again, it's in one of those crazy, nebulous places. Either way I'm going to still be doing my own stuff, designing my own monsters and costumes and pretty much just doing it on my own, because I don't trust places to give me jobs! That's what I learned from being here. It's the worst thing I've had to learn, but also the best."
Holly said she hoped Comic-Con Episode IV could help make those who still haven't experienced Comic-Con understand more about what makes it tick. "To me, the more mainstream being a fan becomes, the cooler it is. If you're a fan of Twilight, at least you're a fan of something, as awful as it is. Those movies will be gone [soon] and then something else dumb will replace it and [those fans] will still be there. There's always something there where you're like, 'Eh, I'm not a fan of that,' but at least they're a fan of something and they're there being passionate about it, so who cares?"
A lot more women attend Comic-Con now than in the past and proclaim their fandom, which Holly said she's happy to see, but added, "I think when we advertise, 'I'm a 'girl gamer', it's just completely opposite of what we should be advertising, which is that we're all gamers and we're all gaming. Nowadays, it's not a weird thing for you to play games as a girl. Giant franchises spend millions of dollars making girl characters, because there's a lot of girls that play games. I mean that's why they do it. It wouldn't be smart if the marketing wasn't smart."
She added, "I've had people say to my face, "Shepard's a dude." I'm like, 'Your Shepard's a dude. My Shepard's a girl.' You can customize the game. It just blows my mind that some people go out of their way to make a big deal about that. It's an RPG. You play D&D, you can be a guy or a girl."
And yes, Holly has costumes in mind for this summer's Comic-Con and beyond. "I do have a Baldur's Gate costume that I want to do… And we're remaking Tank's [Grunt] armor - patching up the krogan so he can wear it again and making the female krogan for Tank's girlfriend, so he can walk around with her. I just made Jessica an Ashley [Williams] costume."
When it comes to her friends and collaborators, Holly said, "They just amaze me, constantly. If I had a dream, it would just be to work with them all the time. What's better than working on a project with people you get along with?"
Courtesy ---- PC.IGN.COM
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