On my end, I am looking at buying a church and renovating it to serve the dual purpose of a church and a theatre. That conceptual project also involves another property to serve as the administrative offices and assorted studio spaces, like a recording studio. I will discuss this project elsewhere when the time is right.
So the licensing, including merchandising, needs to provide sufficient fund for me to implement that plan. As I've said before, I will post the business plan on IMS Producing Partners, which will outlines the business structure and some budget and funding stats. That blog site is closed to the public, so if you are interested in engaging at that level, you need to tell me so I can set you up to sign into that blog site.
I have had recent discussions regarding the CG 3D work that needs to be done on our characters. As it stands now, we will be pursuing both CG and classic drawing/sculpting methods to create the animations, figurines, and puppets (both manual and animatronic). The manual puppets will be both stick and marionettes. These represent two shows in themselves. The animatronic puppets will first be applied to the Parade Float, followed by a walkthrough cyclorama, and ultimately, a theme park application.
So this is a very wide ranges of activities, which in truth, extends even further when you consider that "Zach & Zebby's Grand Adventure" is one story of seven that comprise "The Gnomic Tales". But that's "another story".
Normally this subject is reserved for The Gnomes of New Hope blog, but it ended up here.
In regard to publishing. We have started the process of completing the remaining illustrations. All told we need 345 illustration panels. After all, the book collection is nearly 800 pages in seven books or three volumes. The first step will be to fill in the pages with sketches. The work I have done, has been to complete all the technical layout for the books so that they can be published without any snags. In the instance where I did not have artwork for any given page, I inserted description panels of what the illustration needed to represent. That allowed me to move forward with the printing layout. Well, we have now started developing the remaining illustrations.
So, the final prototype is nearly ready to print. I will be printing the entire collection of books, focusing on the Gnome-sized books as the first items to inventory. Where appropriate I can give the Gnome-sized books away as samples. I will not be giving any Big People books away, they are too costly. I have other details regard the books sales and distribution, which I will discuss elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the books will be available via The Gnomes of New Hope blog, which will provide a link to the shopping cart page. There, you will be able to buy both retail and wholesale. In that regard, the hand-stitched books will be exclusive sold by IMS Publishing, by special order. Retailers can also order hand-stitched books for resale, but quantities will be limited due to more complex assembly processes and slower production capabilities. Pricing for the hand-stitched books is higher than machine bound books. So those details will be provided elsewhere once the production lines are fully established. As it stands now, we are set up to produce prototype materials. The production line needs to be restructured to accommodate higher quantity orders. Also, the packaging/shipping/recieving area is also being organized and constructed, as that is critical to delivering product.
That's all for now. AG
