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Still in the Days of Cut and Paste - Literally!
This issue on The STAR WARS Trilogy and THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION was Michael Lennick's first big feature for us, and the subject was right up his alley. (His website he later created was foolishearthlings.com.) He loved everything about Space, so we gave him all the space he needed for this issue.We rarely put STAR WARS on the cover of Video Watchdog. We were getting bored with all the coverage that film got on the covers of Cinefantastique and other magazines. It seemed they put something Star Wars-like on every cover in the '90s just to sell issues. We were rebels. But we made an exception for Mikey.
None of the illustrations for this issue were taken with digital equipment. This was in the days of cut and paste. Most were stills and photos from our collection or borrowed from others. I would lay out the text on the computer and leave a blank area for the illustration to be pasted in later.
It was difficult to take an 8 x 10 still and figure out how it would fit into a 5 inch space. I used a proportional scale to figure that out.
Then we'd pack up the stills and take them to our printer to have PMTs (photo mechanical transfers) made. We'd tell them to shoot at certain sizes like 56%. The pictures would come back on a thick photo paper with a dot pattern that could then be shot to negatives for the press. If you see a dot pattern in some of these illustrations, that's why it's there.
It was very difficult to do text on top of a picture, or fill in a blank background with a light screen of gray, but working with the folks at Crest Graphics, we were able to pull it together for the opening image for page 36. I was very proud of the result.
Today it seems like that technology was from a time and a galaxy far, far away...
Enjoy this digital one through Monday, and let us know how you like it.
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