Ongoing progress

PARADE FLOAT, UPDATE:

  The templets for repair panels have been made and those panel are being quoted. 

   Here are the drawings for the Parade Float. Current activity is preparing the chassis for paint and reinforcement. The initial goal was to have the Parade Float functional in time for the Fourth iof July Parade. Truthfully however, I doubt that that will be possible. In addition to finishing the technicalities of the float itself, there is the issue of designing and constructing a presentation for the parade and then producing it (ie: actors costuming sets, materials etc,). So our goal is to just get the Parade Float/Portable stage constructed and functional (mainly for use with The Gnomes of New Hope).

    When the Parade Presentation for the Gnomes is under way, then plan is for Animatronic characters to be part of the Parade Float. We'll see how that goes. One step at a time. For now we need to finish the Parade Float and to assure that it is functional as imagined.

 In regard to Animatronics, we have advanced with building the parade float.

  

    Here you see the chassis that is being used for the parade float. It will be strengthened and rebuilt. It is the chassis of a Corvair truck the section in the back contains the power-plant and the section in front (center) will contain a cockpit for the operator. The operator will be seated under the stage. We are working on designing an animatronic puppetry presentation for the parade float.

     I was in Ohio recently and while there I bought a new front suspension for the parade float. The existing suspension is unusable due to rust, however, it will stay in place until the frame is strengthened in the critical areas, which likewise have severe corrosion that have cause the integrity of the chassis to fail. Even so, strengthening of the frame would be required in any event, because the chassis was part of the unibody, which depended upon other body panels for strength. The frame area need to be boxed and other support modification need to be made. Preparations to effect those changes are being made over the winter, with welding to taken place after the weather lets up and becomes warmer. 

Here is the Meadow Amphitheater,
where we performed as 
The Shakespeareans of Tamanend Park

   I have begun prepping the chassis for paint and welding support struts. As you can see above, the chassis will accommodate standard 4x8 stage platforms and not only serve as a Parade Float, but also the core of a mobile stage which can be set up in a festival or park environment.  Thinking in that direction is a result of what happened with the stage that was built in Tamanend Park, being destroyed by vandals. With this portable stage, we can take the stage with us and not leave it exposed to nefarious deeds.

Studios Facilities

These comments were taken from the post on the Parade Float 

STUDIO UPDATE;

   Facility issues are interfering with progress on numerous fronts. These are matters of legal manipulation, which can only be circumvented by succumbing to a payoff and accepting false accounting numbers, as offensive as that is, but it must be resolved. 

    The best approach to resolving these issues is to buy out the parties causing the problems. To do so, I need to gather a significant amount of working capital. This may happen via The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture, Ancillary Licensing & Merchandizing, Business loans or other vehicles.  I make this point to encourage participation in order to gain the freedom to advance more freely.  My plan in the future (within ten to fifteen years) is to sell Image of the Mind Studios. The reality is that I need an exit plan. I'm not getting any younger. Contact me if this applies.

  There are a number of options available to bringing about a resolution to the facilities issues that are tormenting me.  One solution is to bring about a resoultion with the existing facility. The other is to move IMS to another facility and thus absorb the cost in time and money to setup again in a custom designed work space. I am having a strong inclination to build a new studio facility (from the ground up) along the lines of my objectives for the Theatrical Development Centre concept and to have that facility laid out to specifications, rather than adapting to an existing less suitable space. That's a lot of work that would take ten years to implement. I'm pushing 72.

   Refer to the Virtual Studio for more discussion on this subject.

ARCHIVE:
  
   As it stands now, the priority is to complete the publishing layout, because clean hands are required to keep the original artwork from being damaged while it is being worked with. Truthfully I believe that there are less than twenty pages that require insertion of artwork. However, those illustrations need to be assembled from multiple paintings. Beyond that, there are numerous pages that were “completed” without backgrounds, which in many instances looks just fine and works well. But overall, the entirety of the collection needs to be reviewed in that regard and backgrounds created (or selected from existing paintings) so that there is an appropriate balance across the board. Our objective is to draw the viewer’s attention in with a diversity of imagery.

AG

As you may well know by now, if you've been following the progress, I've often felt the collection was "almost finished".  Some time ago, I decided that Jency should craft the artwork as individual components. That means that, in addition to the prep work I have been doing on the sketches and watercolors, I also need to assemble the illustration panels. This works out for the best, because I can control the size and position of the characters. Have it component paintings done individually puts us in a position to do the character animations, as you can see from the test below. 

   So now assembling the illustration panels adds a level of complexity to the publishing layout, but puts us in a good position for other uses of the artwork. 

   While this is going on, the gallery exhibition of the artwork is being completed. We have experimented with the lighting and now I have decided the approach to the aesthetics of the panels and finishing elements of the panels. Further, I have decided to add the model stages and, in all likelihood, animatronics to the exhibition.

   We have a few new ideas regarding the puppetry, the main thing being that we will focus on sculpting the faces, the rest of the puppet components being (for the most part) generic. This will make it easier to advance in this arena. Jency has expressed interest in trying her hand at sculpting the characters, now that she is "mostly" finished with illustrations.

Well, that's all for now. AG 

Status Report 3/26/26

  You will note that below I posted video conversations that took place three years ago. Overall that still applies. What has been happening since then you can see in other posts below. Let me just say that in all this time we have been both designing and redesigning (when necessary) the artwork. Just yesterday, I asked Jency to redo the illustration for a particular page, because in looking at the proceeding and following pages, I felt that we needed a greater diversity in the posture of the characters. In fact, there are a few illustrations that will need to be done over because the characters drawn do not have the kind of consistency and detail that I feel is needed. So in those instances, the artwork is just place holding, while the collection is completed.

.   Five Binders of finished artwork that has been inserted into the layout. There are more.

    I'm pretty well certain that there are around a dozen pages left to do. Some pages are half finished, the ones that use multiple paintings to create the illustration panel. Once the last page is illustrated with the characters, then we will be going back to review and assess the backgrounds. Along the way I decided to make sure the characters were placed, even without a background. In some instances no background is necessary. But for diversity's sake, and depending on the shift of environment in the story, a backdrop is appropriate or required. But in order to complete the layout, insertion of the characters has had to have taken precedence over the background. Indeed, we have an excellent collection of quite detailed paintings of the environments where the story taken place, but I discovered (after creating those paintings) that there really isn't enough room in the books to show those backdrops to the story. In some instances there is room, but by the time those environments are reduced to the slotted space on the page, the detail is lost. So this collection of art will really be shown in the context of the exhibition.

.  Work has been done on these exhibition panels, but the significant progress on assembling the Exhibition must wait for the book layout to be completed. I will discuss the exhibition at another time and, in fact, will assemble the exhibition as an online presentation, for those that cannot travel to where it is physically presented. That online exhibition will be generally (in part) available for publicity, but in whole will be available by subscription. Sort of an entrance fee, like a ticket to the show. I will discuss this as it proceeds.

That's all for now.  AG

Conversations about the Gnomes

    I did this three years ago! 

I took these from my YouTube page, which I am only now starting to use.

 The Seven books in the collection are actually 768 pages long, not 900.

Part Two;

Part Three;

Sorry for the colorful language at one point.

 Since these videos were done three years ago, we are very much further along by now.

I believe I am down to the last dozen pages or so that need to be finished.

The next stage is to prepare the layout for the printer.

Now, contrary to what I said in the last video, I am considering setting up IMS Publishing with a print shop. I went thru a lot of difficulty in trying to set a MSRP for the books. Numerous printers were interested in the project, but I need the price per page to be a fixed amount in order to set the project up with proper wholesale pricing that locks in a margin for each step along the production pathway. Well, I am no finding printers willing to give me the right price. So that mens we have two choices; web printing or setting up an on-demand print shop. Considering the amount of printing that is needed for other items, Libretto, music score, other publishing projects... setting up a print shop seems like the best option. We'll see what happens. I'm leaning toward licensing the machine bound books to a reputable organization, but the licensing fees will need to be paid up front, based on a minimum quantity. I'll get into the detail of that later and post that on the IMS Management Page, which is a private page for business parters as is IMS Producing Partners, where other details are posted.

That' all for now... folks !

AG

Publishing Update

  NOTE: a few keys on my laptop do not work, so letters are missing or tyyyping the wrong character. I will have to fix this on a different computer.

As I have so often said "It's almost finished" and what I also sayid is "Almost doesn't count". So I won't do that. But I am satisfied about the progress.

   All the illustrations in this collection of Seven Books are watercolors that have taken a great deal of effort to achieve. Taking a guess at it, I'd estimate that the total number of paintings exceeds two thousand, I think more when the backgrounds are added in. 

   I won't go into detail about the paintings here, since I have discussed the process before. But I will say that it's possible that we have, less that 20 to do. I have eight or ten sketches that need to be painted, but I know that there are some illustrations that I would like to do over, because I want, either a different design, or better detail.

   

    This is an old version of the page layout, showing one of the product lines "Gnome Gnog". There have been quite a few improvements in the layout since this was done, but this gives an idea of the look of the art. The page background is now different than this. You can see below that a twine edge has been added.

   So, what are we up to? Well, I have two three inch binders with finished watercolors and I have been slowly scanning, prepping and inserting that art into the layout. I'm happy that this stage of the process is going more quickly than creating the art. I also have a binder of unfinished pages that give a quick view of what needs to be finished. That binder contains little over a dozen pages in it. But I also am using the digital files, which are color coded, to comprehend what pages are unfinished. The entire collection amounts to about 768 pages (give or take). I pages in the books that are not part of the page numbers, which are basically inserts. (Such as below)

   Now, after all the artwork has been installed, I will need to review the entire layout to make sure the effects used in the latter (improved) pages is also used on all the other pages. To explain this statement; I have used a stroke and a drop shadow on certain paintings, in particular, the illustrations that are built out of numerous paintings. The effect this has is to make the characters "pop" out of the page. But when I started doing this I did not have these effects refined for the proper balance. So, I need to go back and inspect the pages so they all match. After that is achieved, I can then build the files for the printing press.

   

Now, I did publish a prototype run of books one thru four, but stalled on book five, because that book is bigger than all the others. The reason for that is that Book Five contains references to "The Gnomic Tales" and those tales comprise five other stories. 

   "The Gnomes of New Hope; Zach and Zebby's Grand Adventure" 

is one story that spans seven books. Each book consists of between 90 and 160 pages, depending on the segment. The chapters in the books match the scenes in the stage musical, upon which the Illustrated Storybooks are based. 

   Now these Illustrated Storybooks are designed to also serve as "storyboards" for a film version of the story. So the publishing layout is an adaptation of the storyboard concept used in filmmaking.

   The intention is to produce an animated film using the illustrations in the Storybooks. The beginning of this process is to produce the illustrations as GIFs, which will be used in the e-Storybook. These GIFs will be the foundation of larger scenes in the animated film.

  

  After the books are in distribution, producing income, the effort to advance animation and a theatrical production will advance. In the meanwhile, sample and prototype materials will be generated as best as possible, given resources available.

That's all for now.

AG