}}Skit discussion{{ Discuss what's good and not so good.

By **Duckeh**. 25/09/11, 02:35 pm

I think skits are sometimes really looked over, which is a shame. I haven't organised the two I've been involved in until the week before performing, but I've seen well thought out skits, and they're amazing. It would be good to encourage ourselves to think more about skits, I think.

So discuss! Share links to skits you love and etc! What makes a good skit? What is a bit over done?

By Tails. 25/09/11, 03:11 pm

I like skits that aren't about something too specific, so people that don't know the characters can still enjoy watching it. Good quality audio is important too, it sucks when you can't hear what's being said. In saying this, I'll be doing my first proper skit at Auckgeddon this year with slinky, and I'm pretty nervous...I hope you guys like it!

By Icarus. 25/09/11, 03:57 pm

WOOT, SKIT THREAD!
~~Hare hare yukai. Just please, stop.~~

An easy way to the audience's cheer is comedy, doing a funny parody skit keeps them interested. Jokes where the audience doesn't need to know the whole history of the series is a good way to go~

A lot of skits I've seen are meme based, yaoi jokes or dancing. Not saying they're bad (the dancing skits can be AMAZING, when they're not caramelldansen etc.) For me, I wanna see the DRAMATIC stuff! Surprise the audience with something shocking! As funny as ending a skit with 'THE GAME' is, it gets really overused. I know aiming for seriousness can be difficult if the audience doesn't know the characters etc. So try to keep things simple and clear, hint the character's situation through dialogue.

I think it was mentioned in the other threads, but backing music really sets the mood, so definitely good to have that in your audio. And practice makes perfect~ skits are definitely more effective when your mouthing matches the dialogue ;D

a few awesome skits to share:
xxxHolic - Yuuko & Watanuki
Team USA from this year's World Cosplay Summit
WCS has the rule that all skits have to be spoken in Japanese, but this team didn't use any dialogue in there skit and was probably so much more effective that way, with fantastic use of symbolism. Even if you haven't seen xxxHolic, you get idea of whats happening.

Pokemon; To be a Master but faster
Enthusiasm and liveliness! It adds so much to your stage presence

Escaflowne
Team Korean 2008, I'm sure there was something in the rules about fighting with weapons being a no-no. But from this timing is pretty important and I wouldn't recommend anyone doing back flips encase you wreck your costume. But you can do fight scenes without contact and it'd still look awesome~

Sailor Moon & the Henshin ninjas
I'll end it with this. It's self explanatory xD

sorry, wall of text. I need to sort out of my own for Auckgeddon orz One-person skits are so hard to think up things for!

By Pyro. 26/09/11, 01:19 am

YEAH SKIT THREAD.

I think, as Tails said, the most important thing in writing a good skit is making sure that it's general enough for the audience to understand-- unless you're cosplaying from say, Final Fantasy or Harry Potter or Star Wars, people aren't going to know the minutiae of your character's plot, and once you get to a certain level of obscurity, they might not even have heard of your character! You really have to accommodate that with the way you write your skit, and rely on visual cues and the like that give away character details instead of getting into 'as you know' dialogue.

The main issue with writing skits, the way I see it, is balancing between going over everyone's heads, and overexplaining things. I see a lot of ignorance of the basic 'show, don't tell' convention in writing and that's where a lot of skits fall down: just getting up and outright announcing HELLO EVERYONE I AM AN ORPHANED SUPERHERO FIGHTING TO AVENGE MY PARENT'S MURDER AND THIS MAN IS MY ALTRUISTIC JAPANESE PARTNER, WE DO NOT GET ALONG BUT WE FIGHT CRIME ANYWAY (oh man, you can so tell that I was staring at Icarus' signature GIF just then...). Doing that will never, ever be good.

But yeah, so I'd like to see a shift away from telling and moving onto showing in skits, without jumping up to the 'I have no idea what's going on' level of things. I would also like to see more dramatic skits! Dramatic skits are interesting and a bit more ~daring~. Case in point: remember Aurellion's Madam Red skit at Auckgeddon last year? That one left SUCH an impression on me because it was so different, I'd love to see more stuff in an abstract style like that.

I can't wait to see what skits everyone does this coming Auckgeddon! I have a really silly one planned with Shinrii again, involving sunglasses, a harp, and dancing. :B

**Sponsored content**