Digital Team

We totally dropped the ball on having a digital team in the first GNW. Arnoud from Doe Het Niet Zelf and I thought we’d be able to manage the digital production work in addition to organizing and arranging things. This was not the case. I spent a great deal of time walking around and working with artists to help them with comic technique, giving advice, pointing them to the books we’d provided. Arnoud was managing things the entire time, as well, and the amount of work needed for doing the technical portion of the production was much higher than we expected. This was especially true on the last day of the event when everything needed to be scanned, last minute digital work needed to be done, and etc.

We ended up having to push lettering to post-production, and continually try to work through the page ordering throughout that process.

So in reality, managing the digital tasks is a job that’s as important as any other, and you will need people to manage it.

• You will need someone responsible for scanning hand drawn art
• You will need people capable of doing digital retouching to hand drawn art
• You will need people capable of digital lettering
• You will need people capable of using digital publishing software (adobe indesign, affinity publisher, etc.)

It’s ideally important to have these people involved throughout the process, because this is a lot of work and it’s not a simple matter of finishing this up after the event, because that will probably take some of the creative work out of the hands of the creators and that’s not the intention of this type of project.  

Everyone is together during the weekend only. It’s important that the writers and artists can connect with the final product. So it’s good to have a clear picture of how everything is fitting together. This will also help writers see gaps that need to be filled. 

This isn’t to say that everything with regards to production will be possible in the weekend. It’s impossible to know whether that can be done on such an aggressive timeline, but the more stable the product is when pencils go down at the end of the last day, the more the follow-on work which is done after the event becomes practical, rather than creative.

What if we can’t do the production work during the event

My recommendation is that you do the following:

• Work on the page order through out the event, so that it is solid – try and number the pages in a way that will make it clear where they go.
• Draw clear lettering guides (i.e. sketches of where the word balloons should go on copies or digital versions of the pages).
• Type up all text clearly

In the end, what you want is a final product that might not be perfect or finished, but is something you can actually read (with some difficulty), so that it takes away any need for the production staff to do anything other than make your product shine.