Behind Them Lovely Scenes: Creating and Recreating a Spread

Spread 084–085 — The “first” rough draft phase of a spread in charcoal/pencil. A “spread” is basically just two side-by-side pages :)

MAX & CHARLIE is 136 pages of full-color craziness — and within those 136 pages lie over 900 individual panels. 900 lovely little pieces of art!

Each panel went on quite a journey to get to their final printed page — and even more to get in their final interactive stage.

We’re going to totally gloss over a year or so of “development” work (behind those scenes coming in a future post!), but the macro process for illustrating the book was something like: 1) draw charcoal and pencil rough drafts; 2) hand-draw “final” inks based upon those rough drafts; 3) scan the inks and lay them out in photoshop; 4) countless versions of color work in Photoshop; and 5) final layout and text design in InDesign. Louis obviously did incredible charcoal and ink and color work throughout, while Bryan (our ace assistant) and I stepped in to play our own nuanced roles.

Within each of those steps were infinite other little processes, some of which are described below…

Spread 084–085 // The sun sets as Charlie chases Max into Central Park

Amazing inks by Louis based off the charcoals at the top of the post. Hi-res scans into Photoshop

Louis creates a rough color palette for our assistant, Bryan Tuckman

Bryan’s first color comp! Sweet!

Color comp 1 with inks

This is labeled as version 23 in our filename system

And here is the final “locked” Photoshop master, version 24. We were still making tweaks til then very end!

And here is the final production export out of InDesign — 13200x5100 pixels at 600 pixels per inch (this is an sRGB export of ProPhoto-based masters). A few things to note in this: 1) you’ll see that one of the last things we did in post-production was ensure the entire book moved from left to right; and 2) we pushed the colors like madmen to get the most vibrant CMYK prints we could… and the final CMYK prints are indeed vibrant! :)

The spread above comes pretty late in our book and was created after we established the book’s actual style… but the style itself took some time to develop, and we could only really settle on it after trying a few things.

It’s obviously a little awkward to put up some of this early-stage work, but hey, why not?!

Spread 004–005 // An opening Space chase; our first “comic”-style spread

I remember LOVING how energetic these pencils felt when I first saw them. Louis = amazing.

Early inks — This scene is a daydreamed sequence, so we wanted to experiment with different potential ink styles

Early color and text blocking

Version 4 — Ever more detail

We made some changes to the panels and some of the inkwork…

Version 9 — Details and palette are settling in

Version 14 — final Photoshop master

The final InDesign export with added post-production effects/tweaks.

Some color tests…

Louis inked a lot of different versions of these pages… Some of these spreads were no doubt torturous

Yep — Lots and lots of work! There are 55 total spreads in MAX & CHARLIE, and and that’s kinda just the start… we haven’t even gotten into the making of the interactive ebook version!

So… Stay tuned! Much more behind the scenes coming soon!

Previews of a few panels from above imported into our interactive ebook software…

oOoooo this ebook is gonna be sweeeeet!!! :)

MAX & CHARLIE is coming soon! Learn more about the project and see lots of cool stuff on maxandcharlie.com

Zack has won Webby and Emmy Awards for his digital work and was featured as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He is also the co-founder of EXIT STRATEGY new media, a boutique production company and publishing house based out of Brooklyn, USA.

You can follow Zack, see more of his stereoscopic 3D work, and learn more about his past and future projects at zdLLdz.com

Louis’ work has been commissioned for Disney, Cartoon Network, Sky, and The National Portrait Gallery, amongst others. His art communicates undeniable warmth and an original twist, and he strives to create animations and characters that epitomize these qualities. Louis is based out of Bristol, UK! See more of Louis’s work at louisneubert.co.uk