The Impending Release of the Books

The Books are getting closer to Release

 I am finalizing the remaining Illustration Panels

there is still much to do, but relatively speaking,

we are almost done.

The Cover of the e-Storybook

Notes regarding Distribution

    I have a number of versions of the books.  Above you see a cover for the e-Storybook. The e-Storybook, which will be a subscription, includes not only the Audio Book,  but the watercolor illustrations contained within it will (gradually) become animations, meaning most of the page illustration panels will be converted to GIFs.   Eventually, this will lead to an Animated feature film or television series.  The books were in fact, designed to serve as Storyboards for a film.

   There are the Gnome-sized books; a small version that is about 3.5" square. There are the Big People's books that are about 9"x10".  There is the "Hand-stitched" version and a "machine bound version".  Both of these editions will be presented in boxed set editions.

  I will be keeping the "Hand-Stitched" and Boxed set versions as in-house production, at least for the time being,  because they will become the signed and numbered editions and I have yet to have found a production house willing to make Hand-Stitched Editions who is willing to adhere to my design specifications and do so at a price that works. As it stands now, the MSRP is $34.95 per book. There are seven books in the collection.

   I may release the Hand-Stitched (as well as all other ancillary markets) at some point, to another publisher/producer if the design elements are maintained and the down payment is sufficient.  Contact me to discuss terms.  Basically my terms are; a deposit against a guarantee, plus 10% of the gross on all markets. That applies to every market. That's firm.

   For now,  I am looking to find partners for publishing and distributing these books.  I am publishing in-house but those quantities are very limited. This is because I need to focus on the details of producing the stage musical and not assembling and selling books.  After all, the whole point is the stage musical and I can't focus on that - if I have to be making books.

   I will be making Hand-Stitched books on a regular basis and they can be ordered directly by contacting me via email. I will be setting up a Shopping Cart and selling the books direct using PayPal. 

   I will not be concerned with mass production, unless I receive bulk orders exceeding for 25K books.  If that occurs,  it will be contingent upon available personnel and/or publishing partners.

   Just some recent thoughts. 

Contact me via email if this business opportunity interests you.

image.of.the.mind.studios@gmail.com

AG

Poser Tests

Update:

  One of the people I am talking to tells me that there is a Ai program that can take our 2D artwork and extrapolate the information needed to turn it into 3D.

   It's important to me that we maintain the aesthetic style of the artwork, to keep the watercolor textures. I'm hoping we can do that with animation programs. I would be very happy if we can have a 3D file for each of the characters. Further, if we could initiate action of those files, that would be optimal for creating our animations 

AG

Archive:

Here are a few screen shots from Poser.

The main objective right now is learning how to switch the figure 

from a naked woman into our Gnomic watercolors. 

It's a question of creating skins.

There has been some discussion of using AI to achieve that,

but that is in the early stages of thinking animation through.

Once we achieve that, we can create animated action with our characters.

From there it should not be too difficult to place them into our backgrounds.

But, of course, we will need to animate the backgrounds as well.

I would be interested in discussing this objective with anyone 

who knows how to create skins or work with Poser.

Right now, it is Poser, but is has been suggested the we use Blender.

Either way this is our next objective.

Once the Illustrated Storybooks are in production and being distributed, 

we will be focusing on Animation.

As with everything else,  I am open to discussing business opportunities,

but in the absence of any viable proposals

we will proceed in-house.

As far as animation goes, 

my interest is animating the illustrations for the e-Storybook.

The Stage play will be produced by Image of the Mind Studios

as the principle through

The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture

Board positions in the Elder Gnomes are available,

but there is a substantial buy-in.

There will likely be a Limited Partnership established.

with the Elder Gnome Joint Venture partnering with 

The Gnomes of New Hope Productions

and other Production companies.

A feature film or television series is another matter,

which will be jobbed out and supervised by the Elder Gnomes Joint Venture,

Cinema may be part of The Gnomes of New Hope Productions.

AG

Inserting the remaining Artwork

 Here you see some of the artwork for these books
indexed in binders according to page number where it first appears.

There are six more binders that have not been indexed.

The yellow binder is the artwork that needs to 

yet be inserted in the book layout.

This is not complete, as there is another binder of sketches 

which need to be converted to watercolors and painted.

That involves processing the sketches 

by removing extraneous sketch lines

making repairs to the lines, in order to prepare it 

to be printed on watercolor paper.

Then it is painted, scanned again, and processed 

for insertion in the illustration panel.

After all this is done, the entire book needs 

to be inspected for the EFX on the art,

so that all the pages are consistent.

You can see the prototypes of Volumes One & Two 

on the shelf behind the yellow binder.

I am posting this to give you an idea 

of how far away from finished the entire layout is.

I do expect to start publishing the finished books 

and getting the production line for binding up and running.

Purchasing the Books

Here is a Flyer that was produced years ago

 (when I had no idea just how long it would take to build these books)

It is still valid.

I am building this page to be the online shopping cart for book sales

and will connect via PayPal.

This order form below is outdated as to pricing, but the rest of it is legit.

I will modify the above order form to reflect the accurate pricing.

As of my last production run of prototype books

the MSRP for the books was 

$34.95 

(per book, plus shipping and sales tax) 

 Look for updates to make this page your portal to buy the books.

They will become available after I build the inventory 

and finish setting up the production line.

If you would like to pre-order, you may do so without sending any money

I will inform you when the books are ready for purchase.

Use the contact form in the sidebar.

If you would like a hard copy order form that is easier to read

please provide a mailing address.

Initial production runs of the books, will only be available by direct purchase 

through this web page.  As it stands now,  all books will be MSRP without any discounts, 

because the books are all hand-stitched and they take time to bind this way.

Delivery times will be according how quickly we can make the books.

We do expect to maintain at least 100 books in inventory before we release them

and wholesale orders will not be permitted to deplete that inventory.

AG

Set Construction

 

The Meadow Amphitheatre
in
Tamenend Park, Southampton

   The photo above was the stage I built in Tamenend Park and used to start a Shakespearean Troupe called The Shakespeareans of Tamenend Park. That stage is now gone, I disassembled it because vandals kept damaging it and I got tired of fixing it. I lot of other things happened there, but I won't go into that now. The title above is linked to that page. 

   So, for The Gnomes of New Hope, the first tangible construction effort for the stage show will be an aspect of the stage design, not specifically sets but rather backdrops.

   I decided that I can build a setting in the studio without worrying about staffing the show and going through rehearsals. There is a design I want to implement for shifting the setting around, which involves mechanical design. So being that I am putting a sound stage in the studio, I figure I can use that to construct this design I have in mind. Now, the stage I am building is essentially 20w x 18d, a bit smaller that some of the bigger 1600 seat houses, but I figure there are enough smaller houses 500-1200 seats that it would be worth doing for those venues.I can also design elements of that design so that it could be expandable if necessary. In terms of The Bucks County Playhouse, the proscenium there is 29', so the setting can be trimmed down to twenty, only loosing 4 feet or so on each side. I'm pretty sure I will build it in a modular design, so we can expand it if we re in a larger house or reduce it if is in a smaller house. So that will be the first stage of doing the sets. It doesn't much matter, because if the show moves into a union house, the sets will have to be rebuilt by union personnel. 

   So the set construction will be as I described. I'm also thinking of doing a version of the show with stick puppets for film, so we would do that in-house anyway.

More later, AG

2/25 Update

Here's an early version of this page.
(this low resolution copy is a little dark)

ILLUSTRATED STORYBOOKS

   If you've been watching this blog, you know we've gone through a lot up ups & downs, in terms of thinking the books are almost done. Egads! 

   So, the result of this is that; it seems like it is taking FORVER to get the Illustrated Storybook Collection finished. The truth is that, we cannot force it to be finished. We have taken great pains to represent the story with artwork that express' the text. In some instances we have generally highlighted the text, but in most instances the illustrations are specific to the page.

   Sometimes ago, we began illustrating the components of an illustration separately. What this means is that if an illustration has a crowd of Gnomes in it, we have illustrated each Gnome separately, so I have the flexibility to assemble an illustration as I see fit, being able to move the Gnomes around in the background.

   As you can see, approaching the artwork in this way causes the process to be quite a bit more lengthy. But the end result is - better illustrations, with more clarity. More than that, having the characters separated from the backgrounds, sets us up to do animation. I do expect that once all the Illustration panels are completed for these books, then we will move forward into animating some of the artwork in "old-world" fashion. I have explored 3D CGI. I'm not sure how all this will fit together yet. But I have some ideas.

   That being said, I have counted the pages remaining that are lacking color illustrations.  The number is 60. But, we have a three inch binder full of color illustrations, which are waiting to be scanned and inserted into the book pages.

   So, I don't know the actual status yet, but just guessing, I think there are less than ten pages that need to have the sketches made and turned into color paintings.

   I will be cross-referencing these materials, because I need to ascertain what Jency needs to be working on. 🎬

SET DESIGN

   One other aspect of this is the set design for the stage presentations. There are numerous versions of the musical. So, with this in mind, I will be constructing three of the primary settings for the show using a design I have that involves shifting the borders and legs as part of the backdrop design. I believe I will fly the blacks to reveal the variable hard props that will exist in those positions. 

   Overall, I am designing the staging to fit a 20' proscenium width and 18' depth. This is a smaller stage setting, but it allows for a wider range of venues.  We'll trim a larger stage for this width. We might be able to expand the design and I expect to take that into consideration, should it be required for a longer run is a theatre with a larger stage.  Of course, if the show goes into a union house, everything will need to be rebuilt anyway, so that doesn't matter much. My focus of attention will be smaller, non-union theatres, as a way to build the audience and do a tryout run.  There's also a mobile stage, which I mention below, so the design will need to service that stage too. 🎭

 Revisiting the e-Storybook

This is a sample of the e-Storybook. It's an older experiment,

but, toward the end there is a song we did, which is pretty nice.

It's a duet and it's kind of fun.

Publishing

   Well, our work on publishing is nearing the end of completing the illustrations. We still have quite a bit to do, but compared to what we have already done, it's a drop in the bucket ! The difference is that we started breaking down the illustrations into more parts. Although the paintings get reduced down to fit on the page (an sometimes they end up pretty small) we started painting the characters individually from the backgrounds and doing so on  watercolor paper sized to 8.5" x 11". The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, there needs to be enough detail in the paintings to make them higher quality, so when they get reduced the detail remains.  Secondly, I intend to produce a gallery exhibition of the Artwork. It really is good quality watercolors. Some are better than others, but it is an amazing feat to have gathered thousands of watercolor paintings for this publishing project. The watercolors are absolutely worthy of being shown in a museum or gallery. The interesting thing is that; I can print the artwork and you would be hard-pressed to distinguish the original from the print. That makes it possible for us to sell signed copies of the artwork at an exhibition.

Computers

    Another part of what is happening is that ;I need to upgrade my computers again. The systems I am using are quite fine for the work I am doing, but they are outdated when it comes to the internet.  In fact, I have numerous computers, all of which work fine for what they can do, but (as usual) the technology is changing more rapidly than I am. So I am somewhat forced to upgrade my computers. I am looking at the new Mac Studio M4. So far I found out what I need to do to upgrade my programs, because that also is required. You know how that goes.

Music

     That has led me to explore what needs to be done to set up up to get busy working on the music again. The work on music has been put off until the Storybooks are complete. Little did I know just how many years publishing the books would take.  But in regard to the music, one thing I have in mind is to build a recording studio large enough to accommodate a pit orchestra. Since I am setting up a stage in my studio, I will design it to be used as a sound-stage, green-screen and rehearsal space. I also intend on applying video to that stage, in particular producing "Nunc Licet' for the cameras.

   But in regard to the music workstations, the one I am using for Publishing will be repurposed for music composition ,once the Illustrated Storybooks are finished. The main reason for the delay is that I do not want to interfere with the publishing functions until these books are completed. I can and will set-up more than one workstation for music. I still have the G4 & G5 that we used, I just don't have the time to address setting them up while I am engaged in publishing. In addition to these things, I am working toward setting up an in-house network that will also serve as a test case for the touring needs of the stage musical.

MORE LATER

Puppetry Stages

Mobile Stage

 Below are two photographs of the trucks I have available

 to service mobile stage concepts under development.

1962 International CO1600

 I am now considering this vehicle to carry a

Complete Proscenium Puppetry Stage 

I will be an interesting project, to design and construct the stage 

that will fit the size of this bed, with removable legs, whereby  

the stage can lift up, so the truck can drive out from under the stage.  

This is becoming a very real project, which I am now considering as a tool 

for the puppetry version of the show; The Gnomes of New Hope.

Of course, this cannot happen until after the publishing is completed and 

also in the context of other aspects of the project that are underway.  

This truck is being renovated, in that it will be receiving 

a larger rebuilt engine  and rebuilt hydraulics for; 

 the dumping stake-bed, crane arm, brakes and clutch.

1963 Corvair Greenbrier

The above truck was purchased for the frame and powertrain. 

The intention was to remove the body for the purpose of constructing 

a self-powered 

Parade Float with Animatronic Puppetry 

for use in promoting the musical stage show of 

The Gnomes of New Hope: Zach & Zebby's Grand Adventure.

Clearly, this will be a smaller, different stage than that described above.

Here is what the chassis looks like without the body. Imagine a flat stage stop this chassis, with a cockpit constructed in the center-front under that stage.

As it stands now, this truck may be preserved for restoration, 

as I have more than one of these trucks and I am looking at third parts truck,

which would better serve the purpose of a Parade Float

and allow this Greenbrier to be preserved.

I thought this might be interesting to you.

AG

The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture

   

   The following Business Structure applies to The Gnomes of New Hope, or any other project owned or developed under the umbrella of Image of the Mind Studios. 

    I will be moving forward to establish The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture as a legal entity and I will be selling 48% of the Gnomes of New Hope, along with all Management and Ancillary Rights to the Joint Venture. The Joint Venture will be responsible for Licensing, Contracts, Establishing and Overseeing primary operations of each division, Distribution, Marketing and Upper Management. The Board of Directors consists of twelve individuals who have bought onto the board and are hands-on Management Individuals, responsible for Implementation, Delegation and Supervision. The Joint Venture has the first option to buy Image of the Mind Studios when the time is right for that to happen.

    In addition to that, at the appropriate time, after all board positions are filled, we will be establishing  The Gnomes of New Hope Limited Partnership to fund operations. 

   Simultaneous to, but shortly after the Joint Venture board positions are filled, IMS Management, Incorporated will be formed as the management arm of Image of the Mind Studios, to oversee Logistics of Production Management and Finance. It will be funded, in part, by the Limited Partnership.

     

    The Gnomes of New Hope Productions, Incorporated will be formed using the proceeds of the GNH/LP and that division is specifically responsible for production activities and scheduling of the project that shares it's name.  This entity may be involved in all markets, in particular; supervising all Audio/Visual mediums; Theatre, Feature Film, Television, e-Storybook, including Merchandizing. All contract and Licensing will remain with the Joint Venture and personnel must be reviewed and approved by the same.

   Image of the Mind Studios as a whole, is the source of and responsible for Design, Development and  (Prototype & Limited Edition) Production of all Creative Materials : Storybooks (Publishing; hardcopy, Audio/Visual & e-Storybooks), Music Composition & Production, Graphics, Advertising Copy, Film & Video concepts, Animatronics/Puppetry, Festival Production Activity and Prototypes for Ancillary Merchandizing.  Mass Production for Merchandizing, First Run Feature Presentation (theatre, Film & Television) and the Distribution of such, is under the purview of the Joint Venture and it's licensees.  Image of the Mind Studios will at all times maintain ownership of The Gnomes of New Hope and all the iterations or variations thereof.  

   At some point, Board members of each division have the option to buy shares in IMS, leading to the entity being a closely held Corporation and eventually a Public Corporation.

IMS Producing Partners;

    These subjects will be (and are being) addressed on other blogs that pertain to each division and they will  be linked here if and when it is appropriate to do so.

    Direct inquiries are Welcomed - AG

Producing Partners

From the booth at
The Mitchell Performing Arts Centre
Bryn Athyn Orchestra Rehearsal
( I'm a Board Member and the Technical Director )

    The time is coming for more activity on the Producing Partners aspect of this project. With the Publishing Layout nearing completion and production of the Illustrated Storybooks moving forward, we have a viable product that needs managing. The whole point of the Storybooks has been to build an audience for the stage show and now that those tools are about to be used, it is appropriate to build the management team and to seriously address the Ancillary Markets.

As I have mentioned, the primary mechanism for managing this project is The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture, which consists of a Board of Directors, which has yet to be built. Without the completed books, it has not been either practical or possible to build a management team. Even now there is more to be done to lock in the Illustrated Storybooks, but the business structure for the larger project can start to be properly and legally established.

As you may know, Licensing plays a role in financing operations and establishing those markets can begin to take place, with the publishing and active production line of the Storybooks. 

The Libretto and Score For the Stage Musical

As it stands now, we are nearing the end of the Illustration process and I still need to install quite a few paintings into books five, six and seven. Sometimes ago, I concluded upon a different path of creating the artwork, that of sketch, line drawing, watercolor printout, and then painting. This, of course has been the process, but I focused on that, without inserting the finished work into the books, until all the paintings were finished and ready to be inserted. In this way the energy could be more pointedly focused on completion of the paintings, because that process was dragging on and this was my method of rectifying that problem. 

   So now the watercolor components are largely finished, with a few of the more complex illustration panels needing to be refined. Meaning that we decided to approach the panels by breaking them into components, which allows my to compose the panels as I see fit; sizing and placing the characters into a background that can be trimmed, enlarged or reduced as needed. I discovered early on that having complete control over the final illustration also gave me greater control over the composition of the page. This will be quite apparent to those who buy the books, which, by the way, will be made to order. Details of selling the books will be discussed elsewhere.

Suffice it to say that; the management mechanisms are being put into place for our Producing Partners using The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture, The Gnomes of New Hope Productions and The Gnomes of New Hope Limited Partnership.

An Early Design for the e-Storybook Packaging

   Once these business organizations are established, that is the direction this project must follow through on. If any other scenario may be lingering outside of Image of the Mind Studios, that needs to be revealed, before we lock in our modus operandi in this regard. AG

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Zachary the Great

    We are beginning to see the end of the Art Creation process (relatively speaking). I have a binder of many paintings, which need to be inserted in the book layout. But we also have many binders of Completed Artwork, drawings and watercolors.  All told, we have over two thousand finished paintings (that is my guess, it may be more).  As I said, the full collection consists of 786 Pages. Many of those pages have Illustrations that are composed of multiple paintings, hence increasing the number of paintings required to complete this work.

   My focus of attention now, is on printing the watercolor drawings out so that they can be painted.  After that, I need to process the scanned watercolors so they fit into the page layout. Some Illustration panels are composed of numerous watercolors like the one above. This is what takes so long to prepare. But thankfully, we are close enough to the end of the process, that I can begin building inventory of the books.

   I have determined to separate the drawing from the painting, so all the artwork is both B&W line drawings and full color watercolors. This will allow us to create coloring books for kids (big & small). After the Illustrated Storybooks are finished, we will consider doing a collection of Coloring Books.

Music

Here is the upcoming Bryn Athyn Orchestra Concert.  

I sit on the Board of Directors of the Orchestra

and the design/publishing of these materials and the Playbill is one of my jobs.

Feel free to print this out and distribute it to your friends.

This is linked to the Orchestra's Home page, but it can be printed out.

This is linked to the Ticket Sales page, but you can also print it to order tickets

Regarding The Gnomes of New Hope Music;

    Some time ago, years actually, I was working on scoring the music, which by-the-way was diverted in lieu of publishing the Illustrated Storybooks, and the hard disc in the Mac I was using completely failed. Talk about utter anxiety ! 

   Well, at the time I was working on Time & Key signatures, and the SATB Divisi for the singers, as this is absolutely needed for a workable score.  When the hard disc failed I lost six months worth of work, work that cannot be reproduced. Yes I can do it again, but it won't be the same as what I had done.

   Recently I sent that hard disc out to have the data recovered. This week I got my answer; "No data can be recovered". it only cost me $500 to find that out. But there is good news here, not about the disc, but about the fact that I found my backup files of all the music and I duplicated them again to another backup disc. It's still a bummer that I lost all that work, but at least we didn't loose all our music.

   There are 33 songs in Act One and 29 songs in Act Two for a total of 62 songs in the show. Whew !

   So I will be setting up a few workstations for music. One for Scoring/Publishing,  a Second for Digital Performer Five with Reason for the voices on a G4 (which we used to compose the music) and a Third for Digital Performer Nine, with Mach Five on a Mac Pro for updated arranging (which may be upgraded),  and a Fourth on my Laptop for remote work with scoring.

   As you can see, the advancement with Publishing the Illustrated Storybooks has allowed me to begin focusing somewhat on moving the music forward. As it is, I am working  toward recording "The Stone of Wisdom" and I have a few people reviewing the scores, piano and orchestra, so that we can have a viable piano reduction. Although, Graeme Bier, who has consented to singing that song for us, has indicated that we should do it using the MIDI orchestrations. I hesitate to use my main workstation to do any work on the music until the Illustrated Storybook is finished being published. The last thing I need is to have a failure of my main disc again. so for safeties sake I am not engaging with music on that computer. I do have three other machines I could use. So now that I am relieved to have found ALL the music, I think I can wrap my head around setting up the G5 Quad to serve as an interim machine and record the music with that. 

    I could also set up my linear A/V workstation again if I had to, but that is connected to the construction of the Recording Studio that I am beginning to plan out. I do not expect that to manifest for a few years, as I need to clear out the space for that construction and that is also tied to reducing the machine shop down in size to free up floor space. Just to give you an idea of other factors that come into play.

   Enough for now.  AG