During several years of doing family costumes, I have often thought of doing the Incredibles, my favorite family in animation, only to find myself again and again putting it off, not feeling confident we could pull it off well enough to give it justice or make it true enough to the characters to not look corny or out of place. This year, though, with the sequel having been released, my wonderful experience working on it, and the fact I have 3 kids that are just about the right ages of the Incredibles kids, it was finally time that we did Incredibles for Halloween and figure out how to do them right.
By the way, pardon the pictures being against a green screen, I plan to process them to put them against more interesting backgrounds, but that work will take me awhile.
If you do a search for Incredibles family costumes, you will find a wide range of ways people have approached doing the costumes. Most are obviously done for fun but pretty bad by accurate cosplay standards, missing key elements of the costumes or using pre-made costume sets that don't seem to fit right. My main goal was designing costumes that would feel like what the heroes would wear in real life, and that we were all close to the necessary body types. In that regard Haylee was the closest as a near perfect fit for Violet, while I was most worried about myself and how to "bulk" up to feel like Mr. Incredible. And for those not quite up to knowing all of the supers' names from Incredibles 2, Cameron dressed up as one of the wannabe supers, the electricity guy whose name is Helectric.
In another posting I'll explain in more detail how we did the various parts of the costume and interesting challenges we faced. I was very pleased with how the costumes turned out and we had so much fun wearing them. We first wore them Friday night at our church's Trunk or Treat party, the Halloween event where we see more of our friends than any other. Saturday evening we had a great photo shoot by a family friend, Liz Hopkins. I have some ideas about custom backgrounds, so we green screened the photos.
On Halloween my family came to my work at Pixar for lunch where we wore our costumes together. We couldn't pass up wearing them at the place where the characters themselves were created.
Late that afternoon and evening we had several trick or treating stops, lasting from 4 to around 8:30 pm. We first went to the Todos Santos block in downtown Concord where some businesses handed out candy, but found very few trick-or-treaters and few businesses participating. We then went to a care home in Concord where a friend works to visit with the residents while in our costumes. After that, we had dinner at Fuddruckers (just before the dinner rush) and then went to Broadway Plaza in downtown Walnut Creek and were pleased to find a lot more trick-or-treating activity than in Concord. People were very nice and complimentary about our costumes. In fact, we were often stopped and asked if our pictures could be taken. Many times parents would have their kids stand with us for the pictures. It was fun to see people's excitement over something we have spent a lot of time and resources on over the last two months. Our last stop was more traditional neighborhood trick-or-treating. It seemed by residents' positive reactions to our family costume theme that is was rare for whole families to dress up in full costume together.
We had a fantastic time, though Eve and Haylee were very thankful to be out of their high heels when it was done!
No comments:
Post a Comment