This is my Cloud costume from the Square Enix Game Kingdom Hearts, which I made for the World Cosplay Summit - Australian Heat, 2nd Preliminary round in Melbourne in late April 2008.

For WCS, you enter in pairs or "duos", and together with my cosplay duo; who is the Meow-solo to my Luke-meow Walker... the Doctor to My Jack... the lovely who is now the Sephiroth to my Cloud; we joined forces and become “Kraftwerk Ninjas” for the competition.
We won the Melbourne Preliminaries with our Kingdom Hearts Cloud & Sephiroth, and are now getting prepared for the Australian Heat Finals to be held at Sydney Animania on Sunday August 24th, 2008.

As a team, our aim is to do our best, challenge ourselves to do better than our previous cosplays, learn new skills and techniques and to share our passion of Cosplay with those around us…and enjoy doing it!

OUR SKIT
HERE - [link]
It was co written ( I translated the Kingdom Hearts Final Mix Video to how I interpreted as, and Aly grabbed some of the lines used in the English AC…which I have yet to see…)
We both voice-acted our own characters
We both did the choreographing for the skit.
I did the recording, sound mixing and timing and post sound editing. Also, I did the background video editing.

We hadn’t actually fully practice with our completed costumes due to having to fly to Melbourne to compete and not knowing how big the stage was going to be…(and trust me… it was much narrower than expected) but it came together in the end!

KH CLOUD COSTUME
This will be a long one~

Wig – I cut and styled the wig myself. The initial cut and style took 3&1/2 hours, the styling in this picture took appox 2 hours. Wigs are probalby the most underated part of a costume, but i believe it is the thing that can make or break the final impression of a costume. The Make-up I did myself. (and to note - I am also wearing Blue contact lenses )

Cape – The lovely and insanely talented helped me save some time on this, as I was busily trying to finish some armour work on the other side of the house. The construction and making of the cape was done by me.

Top – I created by buying white material and took me 4 different times to get the dye to work correctly (yup…that means a previous $80 dollars down the drain and in the bin…literally). I made the pattern myself and sewed it on machine. And as for the Pants - Yay for big puffy pants!!!!! Ever since doing KHII Sora (twice… ) I have become to love big puffy pants! They still take me a bit of time to machine sew (as I am still learning a lot about sewing having really only done it for 2 and a half years collectively) but was relatively straight forward.

Belts (Torso, Waist and Legs) & Leather – They were made from my own patterns, a leather glue, sewing, studding, & hammering. The studded second belt was hand studded...there are 24 studs on there...thus I had to go through 48 bits of tiny metal V The middle cross buckle was made from a quick dry papier-mâché product. The Arm Socks and Gloves I made from a stretch lyrica and the gloves were from a low-grade yellow leather which I stained and polished over 2 days.

The Claws are made from foam, various types of glue and spray-paint. I can actually bend my fingers, which allowed me to do my ‘omni slash’ during the skit.

The Shoulder Armour and side Leg armour, I created these using a new technique which I created myself from doing research. Basically it combines products from hardware and craft-stores, a lot of time and patience. Even though it is not metal, it is still quite hard and you can hit it and it would be about as strong as a bicycle helmet. The right arm 3-band leather band was hand made and was studded seperatley...8 studs per band...alot of pain......

Shoes – Again, I used techniques I gained from making my Sora costumes The zip is a functional one.

Buster Sword – This beast took me over 3 weeks to make (due to full time work) but in actually time, probably took me an actual ‘work time of 10-11 hours…with waiting time (for drying) taking 1 week between coats. Due to the material being easily eaten away by harsh chemicals, I had to seal the surface a number of time before putting the top coat of paint on.
Due to my full time work factor, (and my flatmate being on holiday), she helped me do the ‘middle of the day’ coat twice, and also helped with the hilt tapping pattern. Also during the evening, we had an amazing support team come over to help us, (consisting of ) , and Cathy assisted with the coating “night-time coat” and wielded “duel hair-dryers” to speed up the processes…which then in turn tripped the fuse, turning of half of the houses power! The bandages needed to be done once we arrived in Melbourne, and the awesome helped me and kept us sane at 3am in the morning by coming up with random yaoi stories of DGM!
It is not in this picture but I also constructed the wing (with cutting assistance). I will talk about that when I upload a picture with the wing present.

The total cost of this costume reaches past the $600aus mark...( i stopped counting...>_< ...)

MENTIONING THANKS
Much gratitude and love goes to the people who helped us out along the way, supported us and just generally made us feel happy when we were stressed (in no order) Empire Toys for helping us fund our Tickets, Cathy, Lisa, Shasta, Kellie, Eugene, Tsubaki_chan, Catty_chan, Giorgia/G-chan/G-cake/Goober, Luka, Hope, Jen, Drew, and Last but not least….Mushi and Mamushika …we love you so much and words can not say how much having your support means to us!!!

PHOTOGRAPHY
This photo of my costume was taken the weekend after the competition at our “Memorial Shoot”. It was taken by the inspiring talent of
She is a budding photographer, and has an amazing eye that just brings out the best in her subject/model/Cosplayer V . She also did the post editing, I love her work so much - she takes all of her creativity and changes a great photo into amazing art! <3’s to you SAB_CHAN!!!


Disclaimer – I do not own this character.