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| An earlier version of the page layout |
3/24/20
Refer to The Gnomes of New Hope for more detailed information. Posts made here are mostly for reference.
Note that the pages have been consolidated and renumbered so that the numbers do not include the Preface and Appendixes of each volume. This has change the pages to represent only the actual story and reduced the page numbers down to 534. This means that volume One has 78 Pages (plus Preface and Appendix bringing it up to 109) and Volume Two, which is Act One of the Stage Play, falls in at 233, with the balance being in Volume Three (Act Two).I am currently building prototypes of Volumes Two & Three, while Volume One has been published (as shown elsewhere)
AG
ARCHIVE;
3/21/20
Well, the HDTV layout is finished. The next stage is to convert it to both a PPX and MOV files. It is a relief that the primary files have been rebuilt, recovered, and duplicated after great difficulty with failed hard discs and lost files.
The next stage is raising enough funding to move forward (rapidly) to complete the remaining artwork. As I've mentioned, doing this will also move us into animation and 3D rendering. But other funding is necessary for facilities and looking toward personnel. Keep watch on the Gnomes of New Hope blog.
ARCHIVE:
OK, I'qve been carefully preparing the e-Storybook (for the Industry Review)... and this has been going on for a long time. Yesterday a discussion ensued and I explained that when the e-book goes up on someone's HDTV and little discrepancy between the pages, in terms of color balance, alignment, or inconsistencies in the artwork and other things of that nature, will be readily apparent to the discriminating eye. So I have to make sure it is right, because once I release it, the first response of the audience is what will determine it's success.
Well, one aspect of working on this has been consistently dealing with corrupted files. There seems to be a number of reasons for this. I think one significant aspect is the amount of artwork involved. So I have been trying various ways to secure the files. I use numerous programs and formats to implement the layout and part of the problems I have faced are file sizes. So in order to maintain the resolution I have been avoiding compressing the files until the last stage, thus I have files, particularly those that were created with Word, that are too large. In those instances I have attempted to divide the files into smaller segments, but there is inconsistency there. An example is that I have a complete layout, with watermark and a full complement of artwork saved as, say, Revision 95 which opens fine, while the same slightly edited scene, saved without the watermark as Revision 112 won't open after it's been closed. This forces me to go back to 95 to recover the file if an error is discovered in any component using that file. I can tell you that has been very frustrating trying to figure it out and devise a way to secure the files against this problem.
Well, now I'm into another level of file structure. I'm saving the HDTV layout as a layered PSD file, which is working very well, but now I am also flattening the the pages, without the artwork. If you've seen some of the sample pages I have posted here in this blog (or above in the title page) you can see the way the text is laid out around the artwork. Well the net effect out creating these files without the artwork is that I will be able to insert animated artwork into the layout. Up until now, I have had to insert the artwork in the layout, in order to craft the text. Now that the text is finalized, as to it's position, font, size, and content, removing the artwork and flattening the text with the background page elements creates a foundation for numerous variation of the product line. The most exciting aspect of this is being able to use the page as part of the animation layout.
All this for the Three Volume, 700 page set. So, you can see why this is taking so long.
Well, that's enough for now.
AG
