Japan Expo 2018 was our second visit to Europe’s largest Anime convention to film a cosplay music video, and we intended to do it in style!
Situated north of Paris, the Parc Des Expositions is an amazing site for a convention. With plenty of room for the 300 thousand+ attendees. It’s also well served by the local public transport., and there is a convenient block of hotels nearby. Unfortunately, we didn’t book them!
We instead booked an airport hotel that ended up being in the middle of nowhere, and only served bread and orange juice for breakfast. Oopsie…
Despite our accommodation errors, we made it to the con on day one and found out that we had got special access to film with a number of the ECG cosplayers!
ECG (European Cosplay Gathering ) is a huge cosplay competition. With over 15 countries represented preliminaries run across the year, culminating in the grand finals at Japan Expo! The standard of costume and performance is incredible with world class judges presiding over the event! And the ECG contestants at Japan Expo 2018 were all incredible!
Getting to film with champion cosplayers at the peak of their craft was an absolute honour. Due to the busy schedule of the competition, we only had a small time-slot with each cosplayer, but I’m still incredibly proud of the shots we got.
That was only the start of our adventures at Japan Expo. This was our second year at the convention, so we had more of an idea of where to film (and where to get lunch). We got to film with a whole range of European Cosplayers we hadn’t seen for ages, as well as meeting some new faces!
One highlight included a JohnnyHD (Gorilla) cosplayer from Sing who brought his own piano and is the opening shot in our video. We also had a lot of fun shooting with Kogenta and Candy Cosplay, two incredible Ladybug & Chat Noir cosplayers, who are friends of the channel!
We also got to visit and film with a lot more of the group meets.
There is always something joyous about filming a group of cosplayers united by the love of single show or film, whether it’s One Piece, My Hero Academia or Bleach.
On the Friday of Japan Expo 2018, we were joined by Saya Costumes, who offered to help us out for the day! Saya is a friend from other conventions around Europe, so it was wonderful to spend more time with us. We also got an extremely epic shot of her Diablo Monk cosplay.
I was also lucky enough to get to film with some Beauty and the Beast cosplayers who had just returned from competing in China. They had the most incredible waltz routine for the video!
As Saturday drew to a close we got to watch the ECG cosplay finals. With over 15,000 people in the audience, the atmosphere was next level and it was an absolutely amazing show!
Sadly, the extreme Paris heat got to Emi and Miranda, and a “stick versus cheese” battle that broke out between them. Don’t ask.
After three incredible days of Japan Expo, we headed back to Paris on Sunday night to catch the Eurostar back to London.
We were massively pleased with the way the videos turned out and hope you enjoy it too! (You can see part 2 below)
