Archived Files

As you may have seen in previous posts, I have had some very catastrophic hard drive failures, which resulted in having to repeat my work on designing and preparing the publishing files, numerous times. The consequence of that was that doing these books took me three times longer than it should have. Strangely though, another result has been that the design is far better and I developed a significant degree of knowledge about the variations possible in the process. 

An early version of Volume Three Cover. I intend upon posting the Book Covers. As I was Archiving the material, I came to the Volume Covers and I discovered that I had used the Book Cover for the Volume Cover. Volume Three begins with Book Five, and, being a volume of three books, it's cover needed to reflect it's contents. So using a book cover for a volume cover wasn't correct. This is an example of the delays that have occurred. For all the covers there are two versions, the hand-stitched edition and the machine bound edition. You see, when the volume of sales exceeds five thousand, hand-stitching simply is not possible, not without long delays in delivery due to the extra time required to hand-stich books. Even so, hand-stitching five thousand books is a lot of work. I can't imagine doing that for large quantities. Maybe it could happen. I guess we'll see.

Getting back to hard drive crashes, another consequence of that is a great fear and loathing of the undependibility of these computers that we depend so heavily upon. With that in mind I have archived and duplicated extensively. It is interesting to note that; now that the final printing layouts are finished ( sans additional artwork) all the methodology to get to this point is now moot. With the exception of making corrections, there is no need for any of those backup files. Assuming the layout compositions are locked in, the future work has transitioned into new methodology that eliminates a great deal of the layout difficulties that came about because of the design process. It is very strange to look at the design and know that, for anyone other than myself, it is incomprehensible just how much effort it took to create this work. It is true that I started seriously working on this in 1997, but it goes back as far as 1990. That's 31 years! Does that sound as insane to you as it does to me?

And it's not done yet. I'm only into the prototype stage, with some degree of marketing and manufacturing being done. I hate to even utter these words, but, I still need 345 illustrations for the entire collection to be complete.

    Regarding those illustrations; I am beginning to move into 3D rendering of CGI. As you can see below, animation is in the future, but it's starting to look like the future is now, because I am setting up the work-stations for advancing the illustration and animation work. It's not that the art department has not functioned in the past, after all, we have hundreds of panels already developed, which gave us the existing work. But the future artwork needs to be developed five times as fast as the previous work, so I am going to introduce Poser into the drawing process and that will result in advancing animation at the same time.

I guess that's enough for now.

AG

Facebook posts

I also post on Facebook from time to time. Here is a link to a post on a subject which I intend on continuing here.