Well, I thought I'd give you an update on this front.
Scoring
For months I had been working on preparing the score for publication. As for that project, I have two 3" binders that are filling up quickly with the printed music. There are actually 70 songs which need to be scored, so I produced a worksheet which when completed will help out the maestro, but it also gives me a clear view of how many pages for the Conductors Score and all the parts as well. But that is a huge task and I sort of burned out on it for the time being. I've been concentrating on the piano reductions and creating the Lead Sheets for the Lyrical Melodies. In terms of the Choral parts, I've split up the parts which are called for, trios, quartets, quintets & sextets. I am preparing a few numbers for different people who have expressed a desire to sing some of the material. While doing this I find that for one song "The Gnome of The Yard" I am creating a divisi for T1, T2 B1, B2, but that's doubled because we are really looking at two parts in each section (ie: T1a &T2b). I split the parts into 3rds & 5ths (or thereabouts but I really didn't do any interval work in that regard. I spoke to Shawn about that and after I am done with the divisi, we will look at interval variations. Chris Simmons and the Sons of Art will give that song a shot when we get it done.
Illustrated Storybook
I spoke to Jency about doing more illustrations, so when we have the budget to do that we will advance in that direction, but in the meanwhile, since we have literally hundreds of illustrations already done, I am structuring the Illustrated Storybook around what we have. Interestingly enough, I thought I would follow the story-line presented in the Libretto, since I thought that would be the best way to build familiarity for the audience, however, I made an interesting discovery. As I proceeded to reevaluate the Storybook layout I already had done I ended up creating a new layout. It was sot of a matter of necessity, because I wanted to create a rather generic backdrop for the layout, something that would eliminate the inconsistent behavior that came with changes in the previous layout. So really what I did as a test was to create a watermark which would serve as a temporary backdrop. Surprisingly enough that worked great! As it turned out, that eliminated the page variations that were giving me a headache. So I buzzed ahead pretty quickly integrating the illustrations with text... but the text is not a verbatim reproduction of either the Libretto or the Storybook text which I had written is a pseudo-novel format.
What this means is that the current storybook has taken on a new dimension. Without going into great detail about it, the new format opens the door for many volumes, many collectable volumes, so that is the general direction that I am going with this. We have a point-of-purchase display designed as a unit which will hold approximately 3 dozen units, but now instead of three dozen of the same unit, there will be three dozen different units. Obviously the set-up will have numerous options, but it's a good deal. With the format I am using, we can produce on-demand, in-house, so that is good. But if I get an order for 10K units delivered in a month, then I've got a printer lined up.
So, we are moving ahead really nicely with the Story-book and I am very excited by it. I am nearing completion of the first volume and before I move into the second volume, I will be producing an Audio Book Edition and I will be using Powerpoint to create something useful, I'm not sure yet, but I think that will be more for promotional purposes.
If you really are interested in the direction this is taking, then talk to me about it. Basically I am building a new and more expansive atmosphere around the components that make up the story "Zach & Zebby's Grand Adventure". What this does is to set up the foundations for the other six stories that already are sketched out or partially written. So there's a lot of potential here.
Staging Facilities
I've recovered my Art Deco Theatre Seats and will be moving toward restoration of those seats. 84 seats out of the 128 I had survived, the rest we too far gone by water damage. That's got me hot on the idea of building a Log Cabin style theatre up in the Poconos. So that's kind of in the picture for the future. However, in the mean while I am still working toward setting up the scene shop and staging facility. I'm looking at the green screen supplies and expect to match the paint to the clothing. Thats part of the plan for an endless cyc. (In case you're interested- if I decide to do service work the rate will likely be 250/hr, 4 hr minimum, labor extra, insurance wavier required) We have the film/video to implement some degree of production once the shop and stage are set up. I'm building a costume shop, because after we finish building the puppets we will need costumes for them. We also want to build our drops. I'm debating about what we need to build, but as it stands now were going for a 20' proscenium. If we have to, we can trim the wings, but I suspect that that version of the show will be designed for Little Theatre. Even if that version of the show never goes out on the road, we can use it to film the show for television. So that's the direction we are going in.
That's all for now. AG
