Abi & Pedro - A cosplay documentary

I'm Mark , I'm 25 and I cosplay as Pedro. I'm Rex or Abi the alien, and I'm 25 years old this year. I'd been after a predator costume for years and I got help from Rex to find the costume and ended up buying it and he just became. I started off as Alice, I didn't have Abi until about a year and a half ago but I had Alice for about three years prior, and I'm in a group called the UKCM basically they go around as the colonial marines from 'Aliens' and there's a guy in it called Gareth, Abe the alien who wears the red collar and because of him I ended up getting a xeno costume. So I saved up my money, and got Abi. But that was long before Abi & Pedro came along. I had Peyton a long time before I had my two aliens. I came down to Club Rock in Peyton with my best mate at the time. Mark was there, and we didn't know each other that well at the time. He came running over saying 'Oh my god it's a predator!' Ever since then, me and Mark have been talking a bit more. He started getting interested into why I had Peyton, how I built her, how I got her. Next thing you know he's asking us 'could you get me one? - Yeah So I started pointing him in the right direction for the Hunter's Lair, and he ended up with Pedro not a few months more down the line. Then he found out that I had an alien, and a predator, and then another alien. I was working on Peyton at the time, so I came out in Abi more. It kind of kicked off as a pair, having one and the other as opposed to two of the same. People seem to have taken more to that. It's a delicious concoction of latex, acrylic paint, glitter and water. Is maintaining a character something that you enjoy? I think it makes the costume a bit more personal to you if you do it every time that you go to wear it, especially if you're trying to make it look the best. So it's like a bonding thing. Especially with having such an intimate character for a costume that Abi is. Mark's the same with Pedro as well. - So what are you doing exactly? Just fixing her tail up, trying to get the highlights to stand out again, like they used to. Acrylic tends to flake when you don't mix it with latex. Flaking's a big risk if you don't seal it properly once you're done. There's a particular sealant you can get for rubber-based costumes called Plasti Dip. It stops the paint from cracking so sometimes when you use the acrylic, the flaking problems can be really bad, to the point where you have to strip it and re-do the whole lot. I've had a couple of my friends in hospital for not wearing masks; it sets quite heavily on your lungs, so it's quite bad stuff to use indoors. You've pretty much always got to wear a mask but the latex doesn't really affect your health at all. Unless you get it stuck to you, then it's just an inconvenience. Can you tell me what you're doing exactly here? I'm trying to colour-match the armour on Pedro's body to go with his environment mask. Some of the other UK Predators have a few of the masks, they're all in the style of the first movie. A lot of them tend to be silver, but because Pedro's based on the Predator from P2, he's got a bronze colour to his armour but Mark preferred the P1 design for his mask. It was bought from a guy on the Hunter's Lair forum who makes and sells them himself. Rex got it for me as a Christmas present. It's something she promised me when we first met, even before I got my own Predator costume. It's looking amazing, I'm very happy with it. I've left Rex to do what she thinks looks best, but I think it's looking awesome. It looks like it's going to match my armour quite well. I think she's got to add the little laser bit to it and a visor, and we've got to add some magnets to the back of it so it'll sit on the face properly, without any visible straps, so it'll come off easily. It looks mint, it just looks like brushed metal. There was a picture of Alice that I uploaded to my deviantart page and for some reason that's had nearly 30,000 views. But it's just Alice sitting in the back garden - what's so special about that? We started uploading more and more pictures of what we were doing onto sites like Tumblr, deviantart and facebook. We uploaded some pictures which we did at Everything and Nothing piercing. We uploaded them to our deviantart pages and it sort of exploded one day. Next thing we know after the piercing thing, that picture was everywhere. What's going on here? Every website we were going on - Geeks Are Sexy, that was one - how are people getting hold of this? It's obviously facebook isn't it? So I think because we've put it onto facebook, it's just gone 'poof'! Within a couple of days there were about three or four articles written on different websites about us. The pictures had been taken and uploaded, and it went from there. There's one picture of us hugging, which is just everywhere. We've shared pictures with the Stan Winston School of Character Arts page, we've spoken to them online and they've told us that they're big fans of us and just to keep sharing with them, and everyone seems to be enjoying them, so we'll keep doing it. They page that's on facebook that Mark's mentioned, it's the Stan Winston School of Character Arts. They do lessons online of how to build your own creature suits and the airbrush effects, how to start yourself off as a creature effects designer for big franchise movies, or start up your own business, but we've got this association with them as already established characters from 20-30 years ago. So it's like keeping the legacy alive for them, which is why they like us so much, hopefully! - How're you feeling Rex? - Knackered. You get this 'pre-convention' where you're getting your suit together, and then straight up to the travelling you're panicking sometimes on the train going 'Oh god, have I left something behind, did I leave my tail-bolt, a hand or a foot behind? What am I gonna do?' Then you get there, and you meet everybody; it's like a build-up, the travel, to seeing all your friends and being back to where you feel comfortable doing this thing in, so every travel experience I've had has been quite exciting. I'd only met the UK Predators once and that was last March so it was good to see them again, but it was also good to have another convention with Pedro, because he's not been to many of the big ones. There're a lot of predators in the UK Predators; Pedro's starting to get that recognition because he's unique as well. He's not like a set one to the Predator films, he's a customised one, so people are starting to recognise Pedro as well. So everybody's like 'Ah, Abi Pedro!'. The bigger conventions we go to, the more recognised we're getting for doing it. Every time you go it's always a good experience. It is the same thing but you enjoy it every time. People who might have their first time at conventions don't expect to see you, but when they do, they say 'Oh you've just made my day, this is awesome, this is the best convention I've ever been to!' - What's that spray for? - It's silicon, it lubricates the costume, it gives it that nice wet look aliens and predators are supposed to have. Where can you see through the costume Rex? Because of the way Abi's head is, I don't see a lot of the reactions on people's faces; The most I see, unless I try to break my neck to look up, being tiny, I tend to miss a lot of the reactions so I always get the feedback from Mark and the videos that come up on the Internet. So I do miss quite a lot of the reactions unfortunately, which is a bit of a bummer. I think Abi's got a completely different personality to myself, 'cause she's shy whereas I just go out there and do things. For example, she's shy whereas if I was I wouldn't be doing the cosplay thing in the first place It's kind of a ying and yang relationship between me and Abi. I do have a specific character set for the way Abi acts; she's hyperactive, she likes sugar she goes running up to the Japanese stands with all the Pocky on, and she likes big attractive lollies. She's a sugar ***, I'm not - I can't stand sweets usually, I eat them very rarely, but Abi goes running for them because she loves them to bits, but I'm just like 'No, too much sugar - diabetes!' It's mixed, some people are really excited about it and love it, and you get some people who are scared, then you get the odd person who jips you for it they ask you what the hell you're doing, stuff like that, but mostly everyone's excited about it, they just want to come over and look at you, to be honest. After we did the event in Leicester, the first time I wore her publicly was October Expo 2011 I think, that was the first time I had public interaction with her. With the covering of her face thing that she does, it just came like natural instinct to me, it wasn't something that I'd come up with, It was just 'Oh no, child scared, hide my face!' kind of thing. It wasn't anything that I'd thought about before going; let's see how this goes and react to situations. How can you show your emotions without showing your face, if that makes sense? How do you get your body language across? With Pedro you can see his eyes, but with Abi you can't see anything that you can associate with as a human. So there's that psychological bit, so it was figuring out, if somebody's scared, how do you put across that you're not there to terrify them, in a costume that people can't get that human interaction with, with your face? That's really how I developed her character. We've started in a small city, and because suddenly this has walked out onto the street, it's something new that people haven't seen before. Not a lot of people have seen an alien and a predator cosplaying together, because they're such hard costumes to get a hold of and such high maintenance, so expensive it's not been seen before so everyone's kind of gone 'What?! This is mint!' We're doing stuff which no one else is doing to be honest, in these costumes anyway People love it, an alien and a predator just being best friends I think it helps with us being so close in real life that the chemistry's there for the two characters themselves and it just seems to work. Considering where this has got us to now, I honestly don't know what to expect what's going to happen in the next few months. I honestly couldn't say. I have no expectations of where it's gonna go, but I also can't say where it's gonna go.