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The Making of… Fate Actually – Part 1

Huey Yeng

making_of_fate_part1_header

The Making of… Fate Actually – Part 1

Welcome to the bonus section on the making of Fate Actually! This article will cover the general process of producing both the artwork and the book itself.

The first part of this two part article explains the pre-production of the book and potential pitfall that might happened.

If you prefer to see the creation of the artwork and the design behind the book which are covered in Part 2, click here.

Clash of ideas

We humans are a complex living being. Everyone have their own tastes and preferences from food, music, movie, novel and etc. Initially I do not plan to get involved for this year Anime Festival Asia but my partner in crime for this project express interest in participating (well I bet his ultimate desire is to attend LiSA concert).

Given the rather last minute notification (I got informed of it around late October 2014), we need to think of a theme for the fan book. After much discussion at a fast food joint, we decided to do a series of illustration based on Type-Moon product (Tsukihime, Kara no Kyoukai, Melty Blood and the ever popular Fate series).

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There are problems though that prevented us from going with the Type-Moon theme:

  1. I’m only familiar with the Fate series.
  2. There are so many characters to choose from and this means a big problem for the two of us.
  3. The fan book consists of 20 pages in total and due to the tight deadline, I limit each artist to draw a total of four illustrations for quality control.

Knowing the problems, we decided to narrow it down to the Fate series instead. As the Unlimited Blade Works anime by ufotable premiered this season (Fall 2014), what better time to do a Fate fan book!

Breaking down the responsibilities

The problem with any projects is that the deadline is something that is taken lightly unless your very own life is at stake. Other than meeting the deadline, I still need to raise money to ensure there is enough money to pay for the printing, transportation, meals and lodging for the event.

Since I’m in charge again for the cover artwork (which I did for our previous collaboration for the Kaminomi fan book), I need to ensure it look great and suitable for promotional poster use.

making_of_fate_part1_kaminomi

Initially I wanted to draw character only artwork but since I’m utterly not happy with my performance for the Kaminomi fan book, I decided to have fully illustrated artwork with background. If there is something that is missing from the Kaminomi fan book, it will be the background.

Here’s a checklist of my responsibilities for this project:

  1. Draw artworks.
  2. Arranging the layout for the book.
  3. Printing miscellaneous items such as posters and cards for promotional materials.
  4. Book bus tickets for me, my partner in crime and an old friend of mine back in college.
  5. Saving money by eating one less meal per day due to Singapore Dollars ever increasing appreciation against Ringgit Malaysia.

I’m not joking with the last responsibility.

What went wrong (and right)

As mentioned earlier, deadline is always an issue and I need to extend the deadline by a whole week since my partner in crime failed to finish up his part from the scheduled deadline. Although I still see it as an opportunity for me to polish up existing artwork and experimenting with the book layout.

Still when it comes to printing, I didn’t expect that the usual printer that we have been using since the Kaminomi fan book to warned us that the choice of colour use is not possible to be reproduce nicely with their equipments. Well that is a huge blow as I took the trouble to convert all artwork from RGB to CMYK with a little tweak to ensure the colour stay as faithful to the original colour.

making_of_fate_part1_poster_note

Another issue that happened is trying to look for a decent on demand printer nearby to me. The problem with traveling with Malaysia public transport is the huge time sink needed to reach one place. Also lots of printer in Malaysia just doesn’t set up any website to promote their services so I need to travel to one area and inquiry about their services and prices.

Well with all the possible wrong things that happened throughout this production, at least I managed to find a decent on demand printer who offers reasonable price and quality service…! Sort of.

Guess every printers have their pros and cons so it is best to explore several printers to try their services. Once bitten, twice shy.

Bonus Trivia

  1. The fan book originally meant to feature guest artists as a way to promote the book. Guess the short notice doesn’t help.
  2. Since the book content is mainly… ladies (and a little girl), I decided to draw an ensemble cast of the Fate series (particularly the Unlimited Blade Works arc) as a way to have male characters on the cover artwork (I put the blame on my partner in crime obsession with females).
  3. Did you know that the title Fate Actually (and the overall look for the book) is inspired from Love Actually?
  4. There is no proper group name for this collaboration ever since Kaminomi fan book. It’s Tauke and Suzumiya Saito (although he has a Facebook page for his artwork where else I prefer to maintained this website for my updates).

Click here for part 2 which focus on the creation of the artwork and a peek on the creation of the book layout.

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