Month: April 2020

Why Create a Guide of Any Kind?

I turned 36 in 2015. Usually, a number like that isn’t a milestone, certainly nothing akin to turning 18, 21, 40, etc. However, for me it was quite a Finn (er,  I mean, a “Big Deal”). You see, I had launched my Star Wars Timeline Project back at a time when I didn’t feel the need to actually track the starting date of my work. I know that I’d spent time toying around with it in 1996, but I didn’t put together a formal file or actually release it to others until later, nor put a date on any of the releases until The Star Wars Timeline 1.1, released on  Jan. 13, 1998. That meant that I knew its first public release had been in 1997, just not the exact date during the final quarter of that year. As such, I decided that when discussing things like anniversaries for the project, I’d simply link the anniversary to my birthday (Oct. 17).

As a side effect of this, turning 36 became an important milestone, as it represented the day when I’d officially been producing The Star Wars Timeline (by then The Star Wars Timeline Gold or “SWT-G”) for literally half of my life: 18 out of 36 years. Any time spent working on it thereafter would mean that I had worked on it for more than half of my life, growing into a larger percentage with each passing year. By the time it ended with its last release on Aug. 11, 2018, I was about to turn 39 and had been working on the project for about 21 years. I’d spent slightly over two full decades producing a massive Star Wars fan project, something that, while it and my first podcast, ChronoRadio (2002 – 2007), did inadvertently lead to my ongoing “side gig” as a writer, had (and could) never directly provide any type of profit.

About a year prior to the end of the SWT-G, I’d also self-published a nearly 300 page guide to Star Wars home video releases from the United States, the first edition of A Saga on Home Video. Both were extensive guides to one aspect of Star Wars or another, based on something I collected. It raised the obvious question: Why create a guide of any kind? Why produce something like these projects, especially when the longest-running of the two could never earn a cent of income for all the work put into it?

     

I would love to say that either of these projects was mostly born out of a sense of duty to fellow fans. However, while that did play into why The Star Wars Timeline Gold continued for as long as it did, that wasn’t the primary impetus behind the project. Both projects were designed in part to fill a “gap” in fandom resources. A Saga on Home Video is the only resource of its kind (as a narrative history and guide, and even online resources that simply catalog home video products are few and far between). At the time it began, the Star Wars Timeline Project was one of only a few of its kind, and by the time it ended, there was no other Star Wars chronological project of its breadth and scope. (Its closest analog would’ve been something like Wookieepedia, but they are two very different beasts: one a chronology primarily developed by one person and the other an ecncyclopedia website developed by hundreds or even thousands of individuals.) So filling a niche and serving other fans were both part of the reason the projects existed, but not necessarily why they began.

Each of the works was a “passion project” or “labor of love,” growing from my own fandom, particularly for Star Wars home video collecting and the continuitiy of interconnected Star Wars stories now known as the “Legends” continuity. Even then, though, that explains the interest perhaps, but not the actual driving impulse to get started and keep going.

As it turns out, Henry Jones, Sr. (Sean Connery’s elder Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), captured the rather mundane reason quite well. When his son, “Indiana” Jones, is shocked to discover that his father, whose passion for Holy Grail knowledge is extreme, doesn’t simply remember all of the salient details they need for their quest now that Henry’s “Grail diary” has been lost, he answers, rather testily, “I wrote them down in my diary so I wouldn’t have to remember!”

And that’s the key component to the creation of both The Star Wars Timeline Gold and A Saga on Home Video that is often missed. I love this stuff, but it’s not possible for anyone, even an expert, to recall every nuance of a particular subject, no matter how passionate they are about the topic. Both projects have, at their core, a desire on my part to create a guide for myself so that, despite my (presumed?) expertise in either area, I would not need to actually (and impossibly) remember all the minutiae of Star Wars chronology or home video release details.

It sounds self-serving, and in that aspect (if viewed in a vacuum), it certainly is. What I see as the thing that distinguishes someone creating projects like these and someone who attacks, tears down, and belittles others online with their in-depth topical knowledge of a particular corner of Star Wars information is not just a matter of tone. I happen to believe that someone with a deep understanding of a subject, if presented with the opportunity to help other fans learn about that subject or expand their understanding of the subject, should, if possible, be willing to share that information. It’s one of the things about fandom that can help engender goodwill and cooperation, especially in an era like the one we’re living in today, wherein social media exacerbates fandom’s divisions and rarely its unifying facets.

So, why create a guide of any kind? It’s a labor of love that channels your own passion for a subject (and requires that passion to be maintained in order to maintain work on the guide itself), but it is often created as an aid for one’s own reference. Some fans just feel a pull toward the Light Side (so to speak) and believe that such knowledge and experise is meant to be shared for the benefit of others when possible.

It was definitely all about me.

But then it was definitely all about you.

It was all about us: the unifying ties within fandom.

If someone creating a fandom guide can look back on years, or even decades, spent on such a project with that mindset, I think we can decide that all the time and effort was worth it.

A New Dawn

Okay, so that was a bit of a melodramatic title (and a reference to a Star Wars novel), but it’s a fitting one. For years, StarWarsFanworks.com, NathanPButler.com, and ASagaOnHomeVideo.com have languished mostly unused and bereft of updates since Fanworks ceased to be used as a hub for the Star Wars fan audio community.

Finally, I’ve taken the time to change my webhosting plan, ditch the original site, and convert over to a much more functional, easily managed and updated WordPress site.

As of tonight, the basics of the site are ready to go, making today its official relaunch under all three domain names. A single article was posted prior to this official relaunch to whet appetites and get feedback, and now we’re ready to roll.

Welcome to the new home of my various works. I appreciate you taking the time to visit.

A Saga on Home Video’s Picture Process

The most common request after the publication of the first edition of A Saga on Home Video back in 2017 was that if there was ever a new edition, it should have color images, even if it raised the printing (and retail) costs. This was such a common request that I took it to heart, and now that work is ongoing for the second edition, nearly all pictures in the book are being replaced by new color images (not just color versions of the original images). I say “nearly all” because there are a few items no longer in my collection or that are too large for my current photo setup, so I’ll be using the color originals from the first edition to include them, but that is only about 10 or less images in the entire book.

For those wondering how the photo process works for ASOHV, I thought I’d share that process here. It’s not glamorous. In fact, it’s rather tedious. It works, though, which is what matters.

For the first edition, pictures were typically taken with the items lying flat on an off-white tabletop. Here’s an example of a raw image from the first edition:

I would then just crop that image and convert it to grayscale for use in the book, like so:

Since they were grayscale, that was a fine setup. However, with images now being in color, I needed a better setup to capture those pictures. I picked up a travel photobox via Amazon that I now use for all pictures. Such a box has a built-in light, a white interior surface, and openings on the front and top to allow taking pictures with mostly even lighting.

Step 1: Setup

The first step in the process is for me to clear away all the toddler toys all over the floor in my office (AKA my Star Wars collection room) to set up the photobox against the wall, between a pair of bookshelves (protected from toddler snatching by project boards and storage tubs), underneath a window that has its curtains closed. (This isn’t so much about keeping out excess light as it is for heat. My office gets hot very quickly, and that process is only accelerated by having the photobox turned on.) So, the rather non-galmorous photographing setup looks like this most of the time:

Step 2: Raw Pictures

The second step is then to actually take the pictures. If an item isn’t overly reflective, I will typically take the picutre with the image lying flat on the bottom of the photobox, using an opening in the top to snap the image. This usually requires shifting the items a bit toward the back and right side of the photobox to make sure the overhead, built-in light doesn’t reflect on the product. This is an example of one such raw photo, showing the Sept. 2019 Multi-screen Edition reissues of Episodes I – VI. (Yes, this is a new product for the second edition, since it was released over two years after the first edition’s publication.)

Step 3: Digital Alteration

After a few minutes, the images that are captured with my iPhone synchronize to iCloud, so that I can download them onto my PC. At that point, I open them in Adobe Photoshop for a series of quick corrections. First, most need a slight rotation adjustment, which I do in 0.15 or 0.25 degree increments. Second, I crop the image so that the entire product is shown with as little of the background as possible (though I’m not terribly picky, since the background looks fine in print). Lastly, I update the image size to 300 pixels per inch and a maximum dimension of 5 in. (length or width, whichever is greater). This has actually decreased the file size of the images in the book, even though they are in color, since I had not resized the original images from the first edition in Photoshop before inserting and resizing in Microsoft Word. The finished image will come out like this:

Step 4: Inserting Images Into the Book

Finally, I need to actually insert the image into the working file of A Saga on Home Video, 2nd Ed. in Microsoft Word. To do this, I create a new table in the document. In this case, that table would be one column with two rows, since I would just have this image centered on the page with a caption beneath it. (Other pictures require more rows or columns, depending on how I am arranging the images.) I then insert the picture, centered in the top cell of the table. In the bottom row, I insert a caption with the main body font (Garamond) scaled down from the regular 11 point body font size to 10 point. Once that looks right, I remove all borders from the table. The end result is a page that looks something like this:

Now, imagine going through that process for what is currently over 750 pictures (and counting) due to sometimes needing to retake pictures or take more than one shot of the same product to see which looks best. As I said, it’s not at all glamorous, but this tedious work makes the whole of the second edition look leaps and bounds better than its first edition predecessor. To me, that makes it worthwhile.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief look into the development of A Saga on Home Video‘s second edition. There’s more to come as work continues.