Nerdist, Chris Hardwick’s YouTube powerhouse, has added another geeky offering to its network.
From the channel that brought you bowling with Mad Men stars and a Star Trek podcast now comes Try This At Home, a DIY show focused on industrial-strength cosplay—the (often elaborate) art of dressing up as a character from a TV show or video game common at events like Comic-Con. The show follows Holly Conrad, Jessica Merizan, and their team at Los Angeles’s Crabcat Industries.
Conrad and Merizan rose to fame after being featured cosplayers in Morgan Spurlock’s documentary, Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. Both women won acclaim for professional looking costumes that brought videogame Mass Effect to life; heavy armor, flexible alien face masks and all.
Friends since childhood, the pair said in an interview with Nerdist that they decided to found Crabcat studios after the documentary came out.
“We had been quietly mumbling and/or sobbing to ourselves about the workload we had to finish before Comic Con and then had one of those terribly manic moments when everything seemed clear, with the realization we were too broken to have respectable jobs and should just stick to world of fantasy and un-reality,” Merizan said.
The show will walk viewers through geeky DIY projects of varying complexity. The scope of future projects is clear in the first episode, in which Conrad and Merizan gather everything from stapleguns to heavy machinery in order to prep their new studio.
Crabcat has worked with everyone from private collectors to videogame companies to beginner cosplayers, and the two think future episodes will offer something for everyone, even if you’re not ready to make full body armor just yet.
“This show is our love letter to DIY entertainment,” Merizan said. “It’s about gathering your friends together (whether IRL or online) and teaching yourself how to make something, or learn a new skill, or go after that talent you’ve always wanted to try.”
Photo via Crabcat Industries
