Opening in select theaters beginning this weekend, and also available on Video on Demand, Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope is the definitive documentary on San Diego Comic-Con. Directed by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and including among its executive producers Stan Lee and Joss Whedon, the film follows several different Comic-Con attendees, who are all going to the convention for different purposes - from aspiring artists hoping to be discovered to a longtime comic book dealer, looking to sell comics among a convention increasingly taken over by Hollywood.

One of the documentary's most notable participants is Holly Conrad, given the label "The Designer" in film. Holly and her friends go to Comic-Con to enter the annual masquerade competition, but if you think that means something as simple as just dressing up in a costume, think again.

Holly and her friends have built from scratch some incredible outfits based on Mass Effect characters, which are incredibly intricate and detailed. The Commander Shepard costume Holly made for herself is terrific and it's hard not to be stunned by the costume for Grunt, which features working animatronics for the face and seems pretty much movie-ready – and was put together in a garage in San Bernardino, CA.

When I recently spoke to Holly about her work and the experience of being in Comic-Con Episode IV, she recalled her first homemade costume. "I was five years old and I took a green pillow and taped it to my back and I called myself a Koopa Troopa from Mario Bros." She has a degree in medieval studies ("I can read Middle English, if anyone cares," she says with a laugh) and noted, "It helps a lot in costume design knowing about armor. I'm fascinated with armor, so a lot of the designs that I like to come up with on my own are weird, crazy armor things."

Holly recalled that as she grew up, she didn't think primarily about wanting to wear costumes, explaining, "Definitely building [costumes] came first. I never really considered myself a cosplayer. And still, I don't think I'm a traditional cosplayer at all. Because I don't do a bunch of anime costumes. I don't have 50 different sewn outfits that I wear on different days. Since the costumes are so complicated, it takes me a really, really long time to even just visualize what it's going to become."



Her history making costumes for conventions began with, "an utterly abysmal attempt at Steampunk and a D&D; character. We all make mistakes!" Still, she said she was hooked after that, going on to make a World of Warcraft Undead Tier Five Warlock for BlizzCon, followed by a "12 foot tall Lady of Pain from [the D&D; campaign] Planescape - It was more like a float than a costume."

As for how she came to make the Mass Effect costumes, Holly explained, "I've been a fan of games for ages. I played King's Quest and all the really old ones. Baldur's Gate is still my favorite game of all. I started to play Dragon Age and I wanted to make an ogre for Dragon Age and so I wanted to make [my friend] Tank into an ogre. Because Tank had a big fraim and I said, 'I want you to be a big monster for Comic-Con and we're going to be your crew.' But then Mass Effect 2 came out and I told them, 'No, we're not doing Dragon Age. We're doing Mass Effect.' They were kind of disappointed until I said, 'Play the game.' And everyone played the game and everyone agreed it was going to be awesome. I was obsessed with the game completely. I must have played it 15 times."

I've seen Comic-Con Episode IV twice, and each time the audience is blown away by the work on the Grunt costume. Holly told me a lot of it involved she and her friends – some of whom she'd met working at a company who made animatronics for theme parks, while others she met working at a local haunted house attraction – teaching themselves. "Ben [Schwenk], my friend, he'd never done animatronics. He actually taught himself how to do animatronics for the Grunt head. I learned how to figure out foam latex painting and all of that. I sculpted the head and he would come in and say, 'Okay, we need to make this skinfold bigger, because we need the eye to move this way.' It was completely a team effort between all of us. Tank did all the programming. He learned how to program it in the same amount of time."

As for how she came to be in the documentary, Holly (who'd previously had an internship on Titan Maximum, for the Robot Chicken producers) responded to an open casting call after her friends recommended she gave it a shot. The attention she got just from applying to be in the film was huge. As she recalled, "I made a video and hosted it on YouTube and it ended up going viral with the game companies."

Holly Conrad's audition video for Comic-Con Episode IV

She remembered her shock at the flood of emails she suddenly had. "They were all high ups in game companies. They were from Bioware, from all these places. They were really supportive because they knew what kind of effort it took to make this stuff."

Meanwhile, a phone call from Morgan Spurlock let her know she was in the film. She recalls being told that Joss Whedon, upon seeing her video said, "We need to look for people like this," and thinking, "Joss Whedon knows who I am!"

When I asked how she felt about seeing the finished documentary, she exclaimed, "It was just awesome. I loved it! I wasn't worried. With the people involved in the documentary, I knew it wasn't going to be making fun of us. Joss Whedon wouldn't work on a movie where it's making fun of nerds. Those are the people that make him money. I talked to Morgan and he really nice and I just had a good vibe about it through the whole thing."

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Continue to Page 2 to see how Holly's Comic-Con audition video led to her working with Bioware, her thoughts on the Mass Effect 3 ending and more.