So now that our Kickstarter backers have all had their copies of the Mr Coconut book, it’s time for the official publication and launch: tomorrow, 13 December.

For our launch we’re having a stall at Brighton’s Open Market, where we’ll be making an installation of all the props we used to make the book. The puppet Mr Coconut will be there, along with the real Mr Coconut, inside his actual coconut home. We’ll be attempting a live Q&A with him, using some very small microphones, if we can hook all the technology up properly. And if we can make it in time today there’ll be a rewrite-your-own-Mr-Coconut-book fridge magnet type game…

We’ll be there all day from 9.30 til about 5. Love to see anyone who can make it down!

So the last couple of weeks of the summer have been spent tweaking the last few bits and pieces of the book. I’m sure when anyone makes a book they get the finished article back and find loads of tiny bits wrong with it, that no one else would ever notice… but the problem is that we notice, and can’t bear the idea of finding lots of tiny mistakes.

Here’s us rebuilding one of the last-page scenes for the fourth time…

But we’ve finally happy with it… and today we sent it off to print! What we would have liked to show is a photo of us is packing all the artwork into a box and sending it off to be photographed. But instead we have a photo of us pressing a button to email the PDF files.

It takes nine weeks to print, so we should have finished books back at the end of November. So in the meantime we’ll be making the book plates, postcards, stitched illustrations, pants and everything else we need to make for the rewards for our Kickstarter backers.

Next update should be to let you know the date that it’s officially published – we’re hoping to have a launch in Brighton, so for any of you that live nearby can come and pick up your copy in person…

So as a slightly different update on the progress of the book we thought we’d make a short video of how we put one of the pages of the Mr Coconut book together…

This is from a stage in the story where Mr C is out for a walk in the coconut countryside…

If you’re new to these updates you can see them all collected here: http://www.mrcoconut.co.uk/category/mr-coconut-blog/

It was my intention to post a different kind of update on the book’s progress this week: rather than just posting photographs of the progress of prop-making and photography we wanted to put together a short video describing how we put together one of the pages – in other words a succession of mistakes, the trial and error involved in getting to the final result.It’s what I’ve always wanted to see of the work of other people, but isn’t often available – all the rubbish bits at the beginning when the picture isn’t working, through to the point where it starts to work and then it’s finished.

The problem being that, er, the page hasn’t quite reached the stage of being at a point where it was starting to work.

So I’m going to put that update off until next week. In the meantime here’s a montage of a happy accident that took place when we trying to find a way of photographing the sky: we lit the shot far too little from the front, and instead of a daytime sky ended up with a lovely looking nighttime sky.

Chris

Today was a first day of photography for the many props that Catherine has been making in the last couple of weeks. From the storyboard plan of all the pages that we now have on the studio wall we have to work out what angle for each prop photograph – but it’s not really obvious that we’ve got it right until it’s put into Photoshop.

As I said in the last update, some of the pictures (and therefore some of the story) are influenced by the mechanics of the photography, or rather discovering that an idea that seemed fine in our heads doesn’t actually work. (Today we discovered the difficulty in making Mr C stand up properly in order to be photographed.)

Here’s a few of the pics from today:

And some of them being cut out and placed into Photoshop. (You’re not going to get to see much – we don’t want to give away the story).

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been in touch with just about all of the backers who selected our Self-publishers reward, and who are going to spend some time with us in the studio in June and July. We’ll be getting these backers to help us with some of the photography, which will probably mean some of their problem-solving ideas will end up in the book.

Also: we’ve had a couple of enquiries from people who missed out on backing the Kickstarter but still wanted to pre-order the book. So we’ve made a pre-order page on the website. (There’s a special lifetime discount rate for all backers, though obviously you won’t actually want any more copies yet when you still haven’t received the first one.)

thanks for your support

Chris & Catherine