A real hype has broken out around Goldau cosplayer Ruedi Kamer. Just a year ago, he was a completely unknown quantity in the scene, and even Ruedi Kamer himself would never have dreamed of this development at the time. «We wanted to gain a foothold in the scene as photographers and therefore created a character ourselves to illustrate our possibilities,» Kamer says today.
Cosplay, derived from the English «costume player», is when an ordinary mortal recreates a superhero or a character from a film or video game as faithfully as possible. This is how the photographer couple Meier and Kamer created the SwissWitcher without further ado.
From cosplayer to sought-after video protagonist
The rest of the story reads like a biography from the dream factory. Thanks to the originality of the character, Kamer’s acting skills and, last but not least, the cool clips on social media, the SwissWitcher became one of the best-known stars of the Swiss cosplay scene overnight. «It’s completely crazy, people queue up at conventions for selfies and autographs,» Kamer says enthusiastically.
What started small in the spring has now taken on unimagined proportions. The SwissWitcher already has more than 18,700 followers on Tiktok and has given video interviews on «20 Minuten» and regional TV channels in Germany. This success did not go unnoticed and in September Deloraine, a czech fantasy and pagan music band commissioned by CD Projekt Red, the creator and publisher of «The Witcher» games, contacted Kamer and invited them to the Czech Republic for a video shoot. Two music videos were recorded in a 17-hour shooting session. «We started at 2 pm in the afternoon and recorded countless takes until 7 am in the morning,» confirms Kamer.
The music videos are highly professionally produced and serve to promote the update of «The Witcher III» before Christmas. For Kamer and the other protagonists, the utmost secrecy applied until the official release. On Tuesday night, the time had finally come. The two music videos were presented to the spellbound waiting community in a livestream. A whopping 95,000 viewers attended the happening. The game «The Witcher III» has already sold more than 40 million copies since its release.
