Mockup 2: Electric Boogaloo

One of my favourite podcasts is Authors & Dragons, a pod with Sci-Fi/Fantasy comedy authors playing D&D badly, so writing is often a topic discussed at some point. I’m no writer, says everyone whose ever read my blog, but I do love books and reading and every time I’ve tried to write like that I hit the wall so hard I’m surprised my nose doesn’t resemble Owen WIlson (insert self-denigrating humour about my gut absorbing the damage and a laugh track). However working towards this book whilst hasn’t unleashed the author within has been a really fun experience and I want to do more.

It’s been an interesting challenge working toward sequencing and the interrelationship between images across pages, deciding on single vs double page images, full bleed full spread, and other jargon and blah blah. One thing that is weird to explain is how our brains work around all this, not being neurotypical probably not helping, but I do like using the iterative process as a form of problem solving.

With this book I didn’t have an exact shot list as such, it was more exploration based, so I didn’t have a narrative or a flow in my final images that clicked in my head when looking at them; some shots were similar in composition but not in theme or colour cast, others where more different than others, etc. I was having difficulty figuring out just exactly what went there, so I made the first mock up based off of the instruction my lecturer gave on sequencing and trying to get a feel for the book… this is where my first mock-up came in really handy.

Images printed and laid out it liked okay, looking on a monitor in sequence it looked okay, printing it and gluing to together in a book format and flipping through it made it clear it just wasn’t working. Something about making the physical object and looking through just put the entire thing into perspective and just highlighted what wasn’t working, on the plus side it also helped focus the things that did work and helped with the feedback in handing it off to people who could also see the problems.

So I laid it all out again, grouped together the things that worked and set aside the images that didn’t and started again.

Layout Take 2

Because my brain can’t handle the concept of asymmetry in this book I had to work to make sure the large sequences worked together as well as the smaller ones fitted together better, also including more double pages to break things up and another full double page bleed on an image I wasn’t sure was going to work (thanks Jules). Once I got through all the layout I started to make notes on the images of changes and sequencing notes, just in case, and quickly relaid out all the images in InDesign so I could print out a new mockup.

First Mockup on the left, second on the right.

I was tempted to leave it a couple of days to give my brain time to refresh itself, but I just had to have a quick peak and so far I like it. There is probably still more to do with it and I have tweaked a couple of things that aren’t visible on this image (page colour is a major one I might need to still tweak), but for now I’m almost ready to get this entire thing fully constructed… just waiting on confirmation on budget as it’ll make all the difference in print size.

S