Well worth the wait! Awesome suit and congratulations on the win! I too am starting my first suit build soon---any tips you could lend?
Again, Congrats!!!
Well there is a lot that I can say about the experience of wearing the predator suit for the first time;
The first thing is that it's very hot in the suit because your face is covered so when you exhale you get the heat from your body back in to your face. It gets worse when you have to stand in one place for extended amounts of time like for taking pictures, because you don’t get air to flow in to your face as you walk. The other thing is the time it took for me to get suited up which was about 1 hour. I thought that this was too much time. Then I had trouble with my gauntlets wanting to slide down and they would dig in to my wrist and leave cuts and bruises. Then the backpack was hard so that made it impossible to sit down in a chair, or anywhere. It was also very heavy so, you get neck and shoulder pain. I also got serious armor bite from my chest armor. Then, since you’re standing a lot, your feet start to hurt. It’s impossible to see through the helmet in low-lit areas or at night time, especially when it comes to stairs, potholes, etc. You don’t have much, if any, peripheral vision. A lot of the times, you can’t fit down hallways or certain doors. You may have to walk in sideways. Some elevators are small so, it can become pretty crowded.
Also, I spent most of the time posing for pictures, so I didn’t get to see much of anything at the convention while I was in my suit. Everybody loves predator. Just being in your costume, you‘ll get stopped for pictures everywhere, including the bathroom. I had a hotel that was across the street from the convention center and it still took me about an hour to get to the front door of the convention center. You can’t go shopping in it or go to a restaurant with it. You can’t eat or drink very well, without some serious assistance or removing the entire head, which is kind of a lame thing to do in front of other people because it loses the effect. Also, parts of my costume were falling off and the paint was rubbing off, especially in the hands and wrists. Since I couldn’t see very well, I had to rely on other people to let me know when something is falling off. I also have glasses and those caused lots of problem because they were fogging up and/or shifting around. So, if you wear glasses, sculpt your own head because you’ll have to make it special for your glasses so they don’t pull or slide your glasses around. It’s also a good idea to wear a bio helmet with some kind of outlet for the moisture from your mouth to minimize fogging and heat (i.e. wearing a biohelmet with mesh only, no lenses.)
The most I had trouble with is weight of the whole costume. Also, I had to be careful with the wristblades. I always kept poking people or accidentally snagging people’s wigs or costumes. If it rains, like it did there, everything becomes slippery and since you’re heavy and you can’t see very well and if there are steps, you get the picture.
Overall, an unpleasant experience. The only pleasant thing about it was all the attention and compliments, but you can still only take so much of the bad before the good doesn’t matter so much anymore. Any of you guys that go to SDCC, how do you do it? I’ve lived in San Diego before and I know it’s not exactly cold in the summer. It was 50 degrees Fahrenheit at the con I went to and I was still dying from the heat in my suit.
I’m planning on making an entirely new and improved suit to deal with these issues. Everybody’s first suit is an experiment. You have to test it out, see what you can handle and fix what you can’t. I still love being a predator. I just hope that with my next suit, I won’t have so many technical issues.
