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November 2008
Around November last year I explored book design specifics with the printer. I created this mockup to give them a rough idea of what I wanted. At the time the book was square (9”x9”) and 60 pages. From early on, I had the idea to create a cover with the title on a “belly band”, or wrap-around paper slip. This idea stayed pretty much unchanged throughout the process.
As I completed more artwork and further fleshed out the story, I decided to increase the size to 9x12 to enhance the cinematic feeling evoked in the art. The outline evolved and the book grew to 72 pages. Once I was sure of those specs, I made the changes official with the printer and signed some additional papers. They sent me the first book dummy, which is a copy of the book made to spec, but without any printing.
The first dummy was the right size and had a nice cover stock. As expected, there were some issues to correct. The belly band wrapped around the entire cover instead of attaching to the inside flaps, and the text stock was too thin. The printer sent me more paper samples, and I found a nice, heavy matte stock that I liked. Once the corrections were made, I received the final approved dummy. Holding the dummy in my hands was great. It was as though what I envisioned was slowly becoming real.
December 2008
While working in London, I met an incredibly talented animator named Stephane Coedel. He had a brilliant sense of timing and attention to detail, and I hoped that we would have another chance to collaborate after that project wrapped up.
As I worked on book design and artwork, I began to plan out an animated trailer. I imagined just what Stephane could do with Yuki’s world, and the idea was so enticing, I gave him a call. Luckily, he was excited about the project and available to help me make a short animated trailer. It only made sense that the trailer would be for the first Yuki 7 movie, A Kiss From Tokyo, and I started immediately roughing out a small storyboard on paper:
I spent a day turning the storyboard thumbnails into these small black-and-white scenes:
I passed them along to Stef and he timed them out into a rough animatic with music. After seeing it all strung together, I went back to my storyboards and tightened everything up before moving onto final scenes.
You can see from these scenes that Yuki was still being called Yuriko. Yuki went through a variety of names before she finally became Yuki 7, including Yuriko, Agent Y, and Ishime 6. I also hadn’t yet settled on a name for the movie at the time I drew those boards, so I just grabbed a temporary title for placement from one of my old posters, Secret Agent Girls of Danger Cove. It’s interesting and rewarding to see which ideas, like the belly band, stay consistent from the very beginning, and which ones evolve, and which ones change completely.
In addition to developing the trailer with Stephane, I began talking to a few of my friends about the project and inviting them to do artwork for the book. My friends have all had a big impact on my life and my art, so in a way they were all responsible for the creation of Yuki 7. I couldn’t wait to see each of their unique interpretations of Yuki, and I wanted her world to grow bigger through their ideas.
The response was really positive. So many talented people wanted to be a part of the project, it made me feel great and humbled. I have very generous friends, whose encouragement was as vital as their contributions.
It was a tough request to ask them to create artwork for a book of which no one really understood the complete vision yet but me. I did my best to explain it by sending out my latest artwork and story outlines. Part of what made it so exciting though was to get their completely fresh takes on this character that I’d been living with for so long, but who was completely new to everyone else.
Ever since I first met Don Shank a few years ago, he’s always been extremely generous with his time and words of advice and encouragement. When I was interning at Pixar in 2007, I used to ride a scooter over to his office to chat and see if he had any cool stuff to share with me. I knew he liked the work I was doing on Yuki, so I was really excited to ask him to join the project. I remember after I received Don’s artwork he actually seemed relieved that I liked it. That was hard for me to comprehend because first of all, everything Don touches is genius and I had been studying his work for years before I ever met him. Also, he had taken Yuki to a place I never would’ve thought to go myself, and had given me exactly what I wanted - his unique vision of the character. I received the same kind of reaction from all the other artists when they turned their work in. It showed me just how much everyone cared about the project and wanted it to succeed. I could see that Yuki was coming to life in other peoples’ minds, and not just my own.
Coming up in Part III: January to March - Bringing the artwork together on the page, the trailer is completed. |
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