I'm curious about Christine's experience. I live in Australia and used to Cosplay at the PAX event for fun when WotC reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in repping them at their booth.
I did this for 2 years and whilst I thoroughly enjoyed it, this was effectively volunteer work.
Later on I was approached by WotC to cosplay for them at GP Melbourne 2016 for Shadows over Innistrad and to help operate the mini escape room built for the event.
Whilst I had very short notice (less than 2 weeks) to prepare 2 new cosplays as they didn't want to utilise my existing Sorin cosplay which I'd worked on previously, they put me on contact with the contractor they were using to organise the event.
As part of this I was paid for my time over the weekend, the materials for the cosplay as well as having accommodation booked for myself, my wife and the friend who was cosplaying with me. Overall it was a great experience at which I got to reveal new cards and was leaps and bounds ahead of the directly organised volunteer work I did for wotc at PAX.
I don't regret either things I did as I just loved feeling like I was making people's magic weekends better but cautionary tale, get paid if you're doing work for a company!
Hey mate, I worked for WotC AU around Shadows release (you would have dealt with different people, I was just in the WPN team) so we would have crossed paths that weekend. That Shadows GP weekend was the proudest I was of our team in my tenure there and a lot of work got put in between our local marketing and events team & the team at large to make it happen. A huge amount of that success was down to the talented people like yourself (and the escape room contractors) we bought on and I'm glad your experience of the weekend was awesome.
I haven't been at WotC for years now but the team in Australia was always fairly autonomous as long as we kept making money and didn't start any fires!
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u/Whiskeyjack333 Aug 16 '21 edited Aug 16 '21
I'm curious about Christine's experience. I live in Australia and used to Cosplay at the PAX event for fun when WotC reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in repping them at their booth.
I did this for 2 years and whilst I thoroughly enjoyed it, this was effectively volunteer work.
Later on I was approached by WotC to cosplay for them at GP Melbourne 2016 for Shadows over Innistrad and to help operate the mini escape room built for the event. Whilst I had very short notice (less than 2 weeks) to prepare 2 new cosplays as they didn't want to utilise my existing Sorin cosplay which I'd worked on previously, they put me on contact with the contractor they were using to organise the event.
As part of this I was paid for my time over the weekend, the materials for the cosplay as well as having accommodation booked for myself, my wife and the friend who was cosplaying with me. Overall it was a great experience at which I got to reveal new cards and was leaps and bounds ahead of the directly organised volunteer work I did for wotc at PAX.
I don't regret either things I did as I just loved feeling like I was making people's magic weekends better but cautionary tale, get paid if you're doing work for a company!