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Gawain books

I finished editing the images for the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight photobook! The English translation is far from finished, but the Middle English version is done. Whew! To be entirely accurate, I actually finished editing last February, figured out printing stuff in May and the book's been available on Lulu since July of last year, but I hadn't managed to get up the gumption to make an official announcement until now. I am such a procrastinator. I know this about myself, but sometimes it's surprising how easy it is.

For that small handful of people who might actually want to own a copy, the book is available through Lulu!

If you want to learn more about the project, the production diary can be found on my journal under the project_bravo tag. Looking back at the first entry, it's hard to believe it's been 5 years since it started … time sure goes by fast! Thank you to everyone who helped with the project and also for being so patient as we continue to creep ever so slowly towards the final version.

I just realized it's been over a year since my last update! Scandalous!

Here's a long-overdue progress report:

In brief:
* revised the initial letters at the beginning of each fytte (Jul 2010)
* revised the difficult pages I'd skipped on my initial run-through (Sep-Oct 2010)
* revised the cover, front matter, and back matter (Oct 2010)
* had the second draft hard copy printed (Oct 2010)
* took new photos for High Desert exteriors: wall & castle (Dec 2010)
* photoshopped the High Desert Exteriors (Jan 2011)
* took a break, meanwhile circulating the book among others to get feedback (Jan 2010-present)
* next step = incorporate feedback into 3rd draft!

( In extraneous detail )

The second draft is now almost complete!

( pix under cut, all work safe )

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The second draft is now 40% complete!

I've made pretty decent progress, but haven't quite finished all of the photoshopping for section 2 yet. The easy stuff is done (yay!), but there are still 5 hard spreads left: the chapel stuff and the High Desert exteriors. I think I'll probably move on to section 3 and them come back to them later, hopefully with more inspiration.

In the meantime, here are a half dozen work safe pages from section 2:
( Pic spam! )

The second draft is 20% complete! Woot!

Click through for larger image

It's taken about a month to do the Photoshopping of Section 1. Some images were really easy - just tweaking the color or replacing the one person who had their eyes closed with themselves from a different photo. The hoverbike photos on the other hand were a real pain. I'll probably still have to fiddle with them later on as my standards rise. I've left the hardest 4 images (the beheading scene) for last; that's what I'll be working on this week.

One exciting development is that it's now apparently been long enough since I took these photos that I can appreciate them. There's always some unpredictable amount of time after taking photos that I can't bear to look at them. In those early days I can only see the differences between what I intended and what I got; I think the errors blind me to what's actually there. Thankfully, I seem to have moved past that time on these Gawain photos. Everyone in the cast looks gorgeous to me again and the colors have gone back to looking awesome rather than silly. Yay!

1) I got offered a job! I start in a month! Yay!
I'll be back at the company-before-last, whose name makes me feel like I work in outer space. I'm looking forward to doing some fun research and exciting engineering!

2) The hard copy of the Gawain rough draft arrived today! Yay!
It makes the progress so much more tangible to have it printed out. Time to get out the red pen and start revising!

photo of book

photo of book

fancy letter A

ll the photos that require costumes, props, or sets are done! Now I can finally get rid of some of this stuff!

Dates of note:
* June 3 - pictures of available items posted to my photo gallery.

* June 10 - claiming begins; email me or leave a comment; in general, priority will be given first to cast/crew who used an item, then second to people who are willing to pay for it, then third to whoever asks first

* June 19 - deadline to pick up claimed items (if you live far away we can work something out)

* June 20 - unclaimed items now up for grabs to anyone as we desperately try to get rid of everything and reclaim our garage ... if you come to our house around this time be prepared to take some "party favors" home! :)

P.S. I also made some progress on letter illumination (the fancy letters that will go at the beginning of each stanza). I finally stopped trying to painstakingly copy the delicate lines of the examples in my medieval reference books and just started from scratch with a much bolder, Mexican-papel-picado-look instead (which is nicely in keeping with the whole cultural fusion theme, so yay!).

We trekked out to Adelanto, CA last weekend to get the campfire shot. It was super windy, which made for some difficulties on getting the fire lit, but the indomitable crew eventually prevailed.

Progress continues on the book as I slowly get through the last few photographs. At this point I've only got two left - one more with models and one that's just a building exterior with no people. Whee! I'm also re-starting work on the layout, experimenting with backgrounds and fonts and such. Picking out colors is surprisingly hard. I'm especially struggling to find a good blue and bronze combo.

( On to the pages: large images ahead! )

It's been a while since my last update on the Gawain project. We've slowed down a lot now that principal photography is done, but there are still some photos left to take. At last night's production meeting we had a robot making session. We managed to turn out 22 robots in just under three hours. Big thanks to the robot-making crew for staying so long on a week-night!

The robots will be used in the frame story: the whole book is a story being told by one robot to an audience of a bunch of other robots. And of course we had to make them all girl robots as a shout-out to slash fandom. :)

I set up the camera to take photos of us every five minutes for a fun time-lapse effect. The angle wasn't a great one for actually seeing what we were doing, but it's nevertheless cool to see the slowly growing pile of robots on the counter behind us. My goal for next week is to build the set and take the photo we'll use in the book. Whee!

Click through to the gallery!

We did it! The last big photoshoot is done! We had a fun time playing in the snow and no one ended up with frostbite, which is good! I went a bit overboard with the pictures this week; I'm just so excited about how they turned out.

This way to the gallery!

There are still a few stand-alone photos left to take, but those will be spread over the next few months. I still need to make a more detailed plan for this next, nebulous post-production phase, but in the short term I should probably focus on getting a new (paying) job and easing back into the 9-to-5 routine again. Wish me luck!

Also, I registered for Escapade. So I'm actually going! Yay!

I love color! This weekend was all about vivid colors: bright red blood for the deer and bright green skin for the Green Knight and his horse. On Saturday we finally finished the deer butchering scene that got rained out. On Sunday we continued the reshoot of the Camelot scenes that had been taken after dark and also took the opportunity to use a bigger backdrop to make things a little easier this time around.

Click on through to the gallery

At this point there's only one big photoshoot left ... I think from here I can actually start to contemplate life after the photoshoot. If I don't procrastinate too much, I might actually get my act together enough to go to Escapade and Azkatraz this year. Woot!

Wow, this is really adding up to be a lot of weekends. I know I'll miss it when it's over though, so I'm not in too much of a hurry to be finished.

We needed to reshoot some of the stuff from Camelot; pretty much everything we had shot after sunset then came out too dark. It was much easier to do in full daylight this time around! I put both the original shots and the new ones in the gallery for comparison.

Click through to the gallery

The first photoshoot of the new year went well. We shot some exterior scenes with Gawain and Gringolet. The first bit is them packing up for the journey and the rest were for the travel montage page. One of the reasons I love the Bay Area so much is that there's such a variety of landscapes nearby. We were able to shoot all of these in a single day. Yay!

Click on through to the gallery

Now that the new year is here, it's time to start up SG/GK again.

What's new:
( * call for volunteers: )

( * a picture of an axe: )

( * upcoming photoshoot schedule: )

I'm excited to get started again, even though it's been a little tough to overcome the inertia I'd built up over the holidays. I'm proud of myself for really making some progress in learning how to goof off and laze around, though, so it's a small price to pay. ;)

The dailies from the last photoshoot before the holiday hiatus are now up! We'll resume in January when we trek up to the mountains to play in the snow. In the meantime, enjoy these photos: some food, some wine, and lots of flirting between Gawain and the Host. Click through to the gallery:
High Desert Feasts

I have to say that although I dearly love lazing around and reading all day, it certainly seems to adversely affect my productivity. Weird, huh?

Click through to the dailies gallery for more Camelot photos:

This round of photos is more behind-the-scenes stuff rather than book scenes. I'd like to thank my documentary photographers; there were some really great portraits of cast & crew from this week. As for the photos I took myself, I've wasted a lot of time these past few days angsting over the shots I took in the low light at the end of the day. Eventually I just decided to move on and come back to them later when I can be more objective. Never fear, though, there were many good shots from earlier in the days' shoots; those I'm not posting because they're too scandalous. ;)

My how time flies! We've filmed one weekend at Camelot and another at the High Desert. I'll post dailies from those eventually, but first I'm going to run off for a long Thanksgiving weekend and get in some quality time off.

In the meantime, I've stitched together some panoramas of the Camelot set being built. Get ready for a horizontal scroll bar workout! :)

( Camelot set building )

This weekend was fun. We shot the Deer Hunt and the Boar Hunt. In addition to dumping two of the models in the creek, we got to break out the new & improved fake blood recipe. I substituted clear shampoo & red food coloring in lieu of strawberry desert topping to avoid attracting bees. There's still a touch of chocolate syrup added to tone down the red and add opacity, but at least the new formula is only 10% sugar rather than 100%.

I've uploaded new stuff to the gallery. I decided I shouldn't spend too much time picking out photos since there's still so much left to do to prep for the next shoot, so it's a random and arbitrary assortment of photos. Enjoy!

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