Ed Week 14: Putting the book together

This was our final week before we had to get the book sent off for printing. During this week I revisited a lot of the images to make sure they were definitely print ready, and finalized a lot of the layouts.

We realized that we'd overestimated the amount of space we'd need for the text portions of the book, and we compensated for that by condensing down some of the pages to cut out the text space. Even so, we found that we'd more than exceeded our expectations of what we'd produce. We'd hoped to create a book that was seventy five to eighty pages long, but by the time we'd finished, unadulterated it was looking like the book would be more than one hundred and eighty pages long. After we'd condensed some of the pages and the chapters down to more uniform lengths, it ended up at one hundred and thirty six pages in total.

A large part of this week was spent writing. I started in the weekend before because I was pretty sure it would take me some time to complete.

As well as the written portion of the book there was also the graphics to complete. It's been a while since I've had to do any serious graphic design but I'm glad that I've gotten to use the skills I learned in college. They really came in useful for designing the page layouts and the spreads of the book.

I also designed the cover:

I wanted to incorporate both sides of the conflict of the film and Lucy and I's contribution. Having a cover to look at really felt like the book was coming together!

The last few pieces of art I produced were also done during this time; these images are there to separate out the chapters and give a hint of what you will see. These are the full page spreads for my chapters of the book.

Yoshiwara nightclub

The Pleasure Garden

The Cathedral

Originally I'd intended to use existing sketches for these images since I liked the texture of the thumbnails. However it became apparent that there was no way to blow up the tiny sketches to make them a decent resolution so I produced some bigger sketches that you see above. Rather than being an inch by two inches. these were more like an A5 piece of paper.

For the character's layouts I went back to Photoshop rather than sketches. In designing them I hadn't produced any in character drawings and I wanted to show some of the personality of the characters.

Hel

Freder - our protagonist everybody

Joh Fredersen the master of metropolis

As of Thursday we sent the book off for printing. In the end it was such a huge file we were convinced that something would go wrong but actually it went very smoothly. We even hit our deadline on time, managing to send the book off before half past six on thursday evening.

Now to wait for the book to arrive!