Tag: zelda

Wedding – Favors part 2

Posted on by BogusRed

favors with escort card

In my last post about wedding favors, I mentioned I purchased a set of small clear bottles to use as potion bottle favors.

Like the favor, it was also tricky finding reasonably priced candy that would fit within the slim neck of the bottle. What I did find was these candies called Newblers. They are very similar in taste to Nerds and can be purchased in bulk in a variety of different colors. In order to save on cost, I only filled the bottles about 2/3 of the way, which was plenty of candy. I used about 8 lbs for every 30 bottles. It ended up costing about $1.60 per favor for the candy.

I had heard of a cute idea that you can combine your favors and your escort cards. I thought this sounded like a really nifty idea so I decided the favors would each be a different colored candy that matches the table’s napkin color. There’s also an escort card on the bottle with the guest’s name and an icon of their table’s centerpiece so they know which table is theirs.

These colored potion bottles fit right into our Legend of Zelda theme!

multicolored favors

 

Wedding – Are we cosplaying?

Posted on by BogusRed

The very first thing everyone asks me when I tell them I’m planning a Zelda themed wedding is “So are you going to dress up like Link, or Zelda?”

Well, actually, neither! We are not cosplaying for our wedding (though the thought did cross our minds). Cosplaying would not make sense because:

  • Really, who would I be? I’m known for crosplaying as Link, who’s a guy. It just wouldn’t work.
  • Every one’s already seen my Link costume. What I look like should be a surprise!
  • It would symbolize the union of Link and Zelda, not the union of Mike and I.

So if we’re not cosplaying, then how the hell is it a Zelda wedding? All elements of the wedding from the invitation, to the decorations, to the music, to even my dress will be inspired by the wonderful art style of Wind Waker.

The main way we are expressing this Zelda theme is through the dining table centerpieces. Each table will have a wonderfully decorated centerpiece that looks like one of Link’s items from the game. The bomb, bow and arrow, boomerang, ice rod, fire rod, lens of truth, slingshot, and more will be there. I’ll be doing a blog post to highlight each centerpiece in the coming weeks.

…and, well, how would one find a Wind Waker styled wedding dress? Hehehe, sometimes, you just have to make it yourself.

 

Wedding – Save the Dates

Posted on by BogusRed

wedding-std.jpg I decided early on that I did not want to do pre-designed invitations and Save the Dates (STDs). None of them feel like Zelda. Almost all of them are flowery motif crap. So I designed all of my own stationary, instead.

I’ve heard the STDs are a chance to be fun and show your personality, whereas the invitations are more formal. I gave the design a very Wind Waker like style and added a cute drawing of Mike and I on it in a paper cut style. I reused some elements from the website design.

I got the design printed on postcards from psprint.com (fast, cheap, great quality!). It cost $30 for 100 printed cards and shipping (but I only mailed 70 of them). I then purchased envelopes for $25 through amazon.

Include postage and the total came out to about $1.25 each. Not bad, eh?

 

Wedding – Favors part 1

Posted on by BogusRed

lantern favor

Coming up with something for the favors was really tricky. I didn’t want to spend more than $2 per favor, but I still wanted something that reflected our Legend of Zelda theme. I had found a cute set of little tea light lanterns that I almost bought, which remind me of the magic lantern from Zelda. But couldn’t find them at a price within my budget. Note: Some places will advertise a lower price like $1.50 per lantern, but jack up the shipping price. 
 

 

bottle favor But what I found instead was much better. I found these cute round clear cork top glass bottles at only $0.50 each from save-on-crafts.com. These remind me of the potion bottles Link uses to replenish his health. My thought was to fill them with colored candy, something similar to nerds. Guests can enjoy the candy, then reuse the bottle as a vase for flowers or something.
 
A few notes if you do order these bottles, you’ll need to ensure none of them are flawed, broken, or chipped. They also were rather dirty and dusty. I ran all the bottles through the dishwasher and soaked the corks in soapy water and air dried them.
 
More to come on the candy and decoration of these favors in a later post.

 

Wedding – Website

Posted on by BogusRed

fairy Being a web designer, there was no doubt that Mike and I would have our very own wedding website. You can visit it at ZeldaWedding.com (I was surprised no one else snagged this domain).

 
The design draws a lot of elements from the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker game interface. I loved the papery texture and brightly colored elements that were used and tried to recreate that in the design. One of my favorite elements of the design is this cute little fairy stuck in a bottle. I drew the shapes to be angular so it has more of a paper cut feel.
 
We included the URL to our website with our invitations so guests could visit and see our registry info. It’s not proper etiquette to include your registry information in your invitations but it is ok to include a link to a wedding website. We also included a slide show of our engagement photos there as well as any updates that our guests need to know about.
 
wedding website A wedding website is useful for:
  • before the event:

    • save the date
    • registry links
    • event updates
    • engagement photos and other pictures
    • a story of how the couple met
    • wedding party
    • accomodation recommendations for out of town guests
  • after the event:

    • wedding photos
    • ask others to email you their photos
    • big thank you to guests
We’ll be updating the site continually over the next couple months. Be sure to check it out.

 

Wedding – Theme

Posted on by BogusRed
Mike and I had planned to get married in 2010. But with all of the family stuff going on, we decided to push it out a year to 2011. Thankfully we made the decision 7 months before the original wedding date and all of our vendors were very accommodating. 
 
But now we’re less than a month away from the big day and I thought it was due time to start sharing.
 
Mike and I both love video games, especially Nintendo ones so we decided it would be fun to make our wedding themed after The Legend of Zelda. I’m drawing a lot of inspiration from Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker by making everything brightly colored and cartoony. Mike and I came up with the great idea of having each of the dining tables have a different item from the Zelda games. (more details on that in a later post)
 
In order to best communicate our theme to our vendors, I put together a document for it, sort of like a creative brief. Here are a few pages from it.

Theme brief

This page has a variety of images from Legend of Zelda and gives people a sense of what the game is about and the spirit of what we’re going for.

 

venue brief

Many of our vendors were unfamiliar with our venue, so we provided some pictures to give a sense of what the place is like; outdoors and woodsy.

 

word cloud

Every wedding is different. Some are a formal and elegant affair, while others are more laid back. It was important to me that our vendors understood that this was meant to be a light hearted, colorful, and whimsical event. A word cloud is a simple way to communicate this.

 

color palette

Most weddings usually have one, maybe two colors that are used. But I wanted it to be clear to our vendors that we are using the full rainbow of colors. These are all colors that I thought felt most like The Wind Waker. I didn’t stick strictly to these colors because it’s difficult to get exact matches of fabrics, etc, but I did use it as a starting point.

 

More posts to come soon!

 

AX08 – The good, the bad, and the ugly

Posted on by BogusRed

Micheal Toews, Dan Hummel, and I attended Anime Expo which was located in downtown LA. We made the 7+ hour drive down from San Jose for this con. We were all AX virgins. We came away with lukewarm feelings about the experience.

Cosplay

There was a lot of really good cosplay. About the same as what’s at Fanime. You can see my album of photos at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/bogusred/AnimeExpo2008

There were a lot of good Legend of Zelda cosplayers:

The cosplay gatherings were pretty good but I think it would be great if the info desks knew about them and could help answer questions about them. I know the gatherings are organized by attendees, usually on cosplay.com, but it would have been nice if there was at least a sign near the entrance saying where all the gatherings were, like with what they did at Fanime. There was a lot of confusion about where the Legend of Zelda cosplay gathering was supposed to be at. Part of this is because this was the first year AX was at the LA Convention Center, so people didn’t know where a good place for the gathering was.

Convention

There were a LOT of people. It was cool to be a part of something so big, but it got rather crowded at times. I wanted to attend the masquerade, however, the line for tickets was really long, wrapping around the building out in the hot sun! No way were we going to stand in that line.

The staff were also not informed enough about how to obtain tickets for masquerade. We got three different answers from staff about where to go for tickets and what the process was. Also the information in the AX booklet was confusing.

That’s another thing. AX really needs to get professional writers to explain information on their websites and in their booklets.AX’s website was awful . It took me forever to figure out how to get the schedule online. Their website is really hard to navigate and the information on each page was poorly organized. Not to mention their web site design was bad. I thought the way they organized the schedule itself was fairly easy to read. But everything else was hard to understand.

We did see a really good movie showing in one of the rooms, but the projector appeared to be going bad as 2/3rds of the way through, the projector got dim. It was a 35mm movie I believe.

The Gong show was kind of cool.

The panel line up did not seem particularly interesting. I don’t think I saw a single cosplay related panel. There were a couple of art panels but I ended up not going to any as none of them really peaked my interest.

Artists alley was amazing. The skill level of the artists and the amount of artists was much larger than that at Fanime. I ended up buying a lot of art. And one of the artists was one I had seen on DeviantArt. It was kind of cool to meet him in person.

Micheal said the lineup of video showings was not as good as Fanime. And he didn’t even like Fanime’s lineup this year so I guess AX’s must have been pretty bad.

Hotel

We stayed at the LA Athletic Club and we most likely wont stay there again.

First off, I reserved my hotel room through the AX website. I managed to navigate through their really poorly made web app to reserve a room and it said the LA Athletic club rooms were 3 people per room. It asked whether I wanted a room with one bed or two beds and I selected two. But when we arrived at the LAAC they said the room only has one bed (a king) and that all of their rooms are like that. WTF?

The lobby area and breakfast area looked really nice. But our room was kind of lacking. The faucets were leaky, the shower head didn’t work well, the mini fridge barely worked, and the only internet access they had was a really flaky wireless connection that kept dropping off every five minutes. We could only get a few bars of signal strength with it. Why, why, why, couldn’t they have a wired connection? This hotel was so ancient.

One thing that was good though was the shuttle system. If you stay at one of the convention center’s list of preferred hotels, there is a shuttle service that will run to and from the hotels and the convention center. This system worked really nicely.

Food

My friends and I were not too impressed with downtown LA. It was very difficult to find a restaurant to eat at. We were hoping to just be able to walk down the streets and find a place to eat. But the area seemed rather deserted and almost everything was closed. Granted, it was on 4th of July weekend, but still, there should have been more places opened. Not to mention the place was filthy. A lot like San Francisco.

We did find a really nice sit down restaurant called Wokcano that serves Japanese, Thai, and Chinese food. It was really good. I’d recommend it if you are in the downtown LA area.

My Cosplay Experience

Cosplaying was fun but it wasn’t as fun as Fanime. At Fanime, random fangirls would come up to me and hug me. Not so much of that at AX. I think the maturity level at AX is probably much higher.

I only wore my costume on Friday and Saturday. By mid-day Saturday my chainmail started breaking. I could hear and feel the rings popping off throughout the day. By the evening my chain-mail was drooping down my arms. I went back to the hotel room and took it off. I’ll need to do quite a bit of work to repair it.

It was really painful carrying around the shield on my back with the chain-mail on. I had indentations in my shoulders from the rings. But carrying it on my back was way better than on my arm the whole day. The darn thing is really heavy.

My sword worked well. I had no problems with it.

There was a really good Princess Zelda and Gannon from Twilight Princess. I had signed up and pre-paid for a photo shoot and invited the two of them to come along. Unfortunately, my photographer stood me up so I couldn’t get good photos taken. But here’s a photo taken of us with my camera.

So in the end…

So all-in-all it was fun but perhaps not worth the 7+ hour drive. We may or may not attend next year. Perhaps we will just stick toFanime.

 

 

hahaha.mid

Posted on by BogusRed

First off, a couple updates
New music in the music section:
:music: 18 Minute Zelda – Zelda: A Link to the Past
:music: En Route To Evil – Final Fantasy 7, 8

And that new PaperDemon illustration is complete but I’m not going to publish it until the new PD template debuts.

Onto my blog post…
I’ll warn you first, I’m about to tell you a very ridiculous story.

Back in the days of AOL 3.1 when I was like 13 and had AOL as my internet service provider, AOL had recently introduced their Hometown AOL service where members had a couple megs of storage for a personal website. There was this one person, can’t remember his alias but we’ll call him Craig for now, who had a Vegeta shrine web page that I thought was pretty snazzy. His web page was auto-playing a midi file of a song I had never heard of but I assumed it was a Dragon Ball Z song. I thought the song was really cool and I forever associated it with Vegeta because of the context I had first heard it in. I loved the song so much that I decided to email Craig and ask him to email me the MIDI. He was quite rude about it and refused to send it to me. Being the smart ass annoying person that I was on the Internet at age 13, I replied and said that he should just give it to me because he didn’t compose it anyway. The rights to it belong to the creators of Dragon Ball Z. He replied saying that it wasn’t from DBZ but is instead from a Mega Man game.

I was just starting to learn some HTML at the time and decided to see if I could figure out a way to extract the MIDI file from the webpage. Sure enough, I viewed the source, found the file name, and typed the direct location of the file in my browser and was able to save the midi to my computer. I saved the file name as hahaha.mid. 😛

Some years later I wanted to try and get an MP3 file of the song since MIDIs tend to sound so crappy. I could not for the life of me find any Megaman song that sounded anything like hahaha.mid and eventually gave up on ever finding it. Then one day as I was flipping through channels on the television, I heard hahaha.mid playing on Dancing with the Stars as two contestants were leaving the stage. I realized the song must not have been a Megaman song. More recently I had heard it in a football commercial. If I could only figure out the title of the song I could track down the MP3.

And then it finally happened.

Yesterday I was searching around YouTube and came across an AMV (Anime Music Video) of Dragon Ball Z that was playing hahaha.mid and credited the song as The Final Countdown by Europe. FINALLY I had the answers I was looking for for YEARS! And I immediately went onto iTunes to purchase the song.

It’s funny how this whole thing started and ended with Dragon Ball Z. The source of all knowledge truly is Dragon Ball Z. Things really came full circle.