When Ingenius Designs approached me about bringing one of my favorite characters—Link from Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda video game franchise—to life, I was ecstatic. I’d loved costuming, sewing and leatherwork ever since I was a kid, but I’d never really done cosplay before.
I’ll cover the project in more detail below, but first, here’s the final product:
Getting back to the project itself…I had always imagined Link as a real-life (if a bit larger-than-life) sort of hero. He lived in a real world and fought real enemies. Sure, he looked like a slender teenage boy in the games, but in reality, he was a real man.
I mean, the guy plays Whack-a-Mole with dragons! That’s not exactly what you expect from a 15-year-old in tights.
So, when I was asked to make my own Link costume, this was the version of Link I wanted to depict. My Link wouldn’t be a kid in a brightly colored tunic, he’d be a fully-grown warrior.
This costume led to a years-long labor of love where we combined costuming, photography and photo-editing to recreate Link’s world in beautiful detail: The Legend of Zelda Cosplay Project.
While the pictures were great, Ingenius Designs really wanted a great way to showcase them, so they asked me to create a video slideshow featuring all of the images they’d created.
Adding Method to the Madness
After all the effort that we had put into this project, I wanted to create something special to showcase these images. While it would ultimately be a montage of pictures, I didn’t want it to feel like a montage of pictures.
Most of the cosplay videos on YouTube feel a lot like a montage. The cosplays themselves are very nice, but a slideshow-type video just didn’t seem to capture the magic Ingenius Designs had worked so hard to create.
Once I tossed slideshows out as an option, I started thinking about how Hollywood approaches this sort of situation. Obviously, movies and TV shows aren’t a slideshow, but in many cases, the credits (or title sequence) depict a series of still (or largely still) images.
I’ve always been a huge Lord of the Rings fans, so my mind immediately went to the final credits for the Return of the King.
To me, the Legend of Zelda Cosplay Project was about remembering and celebrating the memories we’ve all made playing the Legend of Zelda, so the poignant feel of these credits—accompanied by Annie Lennox’s soulful “Into the West”—immediately seemed “right” to me.
As I tried to figure out how to adapt this style and feel to the Legend of Zelda Cosplay Project, I kept coming back to the idea of a watercolor reveal. As an art form, watercolor is an interesting combination of realism and surrealism. With a watercolor effect, even the most basic photo can suddenly seem magical—which was exactly what I wanted to achieve with this video.
After discussing things with Ingenius Designs, we agreed that this format would be the ideal way to present their images. From there, it was time to dig in and do it!
Getting It Done
It took a ton of time, effort, contacting cosplayers, getting music rights, editing sounds and soundtracks, building (and rebuilding) scenes and effects, and creating tons of written and visual content, but in the end, the result was a truly beautiful homage to some of the best video games ever made.
To be honest, this years-long project is one of my favorite projects of all time. The complexity of the images, the teamwork required to create them and the poignancy of the final video product were well worth the time it took to create them. Enjoy!