Hi, my name is Dylon and I teach chainmail.
I discovered this ancient art after watching the cheesy Jean Claude Vanne Damme movie Cyborg on VHS nearly three decades ago.
Since that fateful date I have written books, created numerous tutorials on various chain weaves and provided instruction to students of all ages.
The last fan convention I attended in person (instead of via social media) was nearly 20 years ago. This is mostly due to living on remote northern island called Manitoulin which is about 3 hours from Sudbury and 8 hours from Toronto by car.
So when the opportunity to attend Graphic Con at the Sudbury Arena with my friend and social media guru Christine from Life on Manitoulin - I decide to go dressed as my chainman self. After all, I would not have survived the past 30 years as a freelance artist if I was not my own hero.
Nothing represents this better than the Herochain.com print-all-over t-shirts we were wearing. Which not only represent my personal philosophy of knowing what you are and wearing it like armour, but are also quality print-on-demand (POD) products produced via Society 6.
This is a service which not only benefits the environment, but also allow math-blind artists like myself deal squarely with our fans by letting a reputable organization handle all the dirty work. Such as overhead, wholesale, customer service and returns.
I also think that it’s wonderful that as a Herochain.com ambassador, Society 6 curators can also become their own hero by earning real-life affiliate dollars sharing the creative content they love.
Completing my cosplay homage to Cyborg was a chest-mounted GoPro Hero 4 Silver capturing time-lapse footage for just about the entire duration of our afternoon convention attendance - condensing 3 hours of continuous photographs into approximately 8 minutes of video.
Capturing a frame every half second resulted in somewhat blurry action which I have mixed with start and stop captions. I call the resulting point-of-view the “Chainman Effect” in the spirit of an unholy alliance between Tove Lo’s Habits and Hardcore Henry. If the resulting POV low is a little too dizzying for you, imagine how existence is for me or feel free to use the pause button liberally to enjoy the convention scenery.
The truth is that editing this composition by compressing 8 minutes of native 4K footage into 5 minutes of start/stop 1080p pressed my venerable PC to the bleeding edge. As will uploading the resulting file to Youtube and Facebook. For editing I was using VideoPad from NCH Software for the first time at the suggestion of my friend Will Smith, who obviously has way more video editing experience than myself.
Special thanks to Valentina Carias from Because Geek for being the coolest (and only) YouTube celebrity I've ever met in person with some truly down-to-earth advice and a friendly reminder that even heroes crash their hardware from time-to-time - especially whilst editing crazy timelapse videos.
It’s my sincere hope that you enjoy this trip through the multiverse with thanks to all the great cosplayers who participated in this work of living art for Whytes.tv! Especially the ones I missed capturing like the Final Fantasy Crew, Boba Fett, Scarecrow, some kind of strange robot oven, the Pines family of Gravity Falls, Nina Tucker - the uber-creepy dog-girl chimera from Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, at least 4 different Harley Quinns and a million more multiverse attendees I cannot recall!
Next convention I’ll definitely stick around for the Masquerade and will hopefully have more than a couple of days of preparation - also, please let me know what you think of this video!
