We started with a really bold statement of our 3D artwork and captured people’s imaginations
there to such a degree that, cool, now we can, kind of, tell the story then.
You can take this book and you can completely lose yourself within this world.
There’s just an amazing breath of content, you’ll want to tear it out of the book and frame it.
The world-building challenge to me has always been something that, like, fascinates me.
And that while I think good storytelling is solid in its own right;
I think it is really wonderful and certainly captivating when it’s got a deeper point of view.
Up until now, you know, people have seen the statues and they’ve got little tastes of the story,
but this is actually our first time we’re telling the whole story,
or at least the first half of the story I guess we could say.
The book is presented as if you are dead, and you just came through into the Underworld,
so you know nothing about this world.
It’s an Underworld handbook to being dead, but it reads more like poetry or like Chaucer.
It’s a lot like a guidebook, you find out about the places you’ll go and the people you'll meet,
and the things that you’ll see.
It is a book that explores a world in its fullest and most realistic capacity where we've taken this Underworld,
and we’ve built it in a way that you can go, “Well, who am I in this world?
Where do I want to go, and what role will I have?”
I’ve never been involved with such an intense and thorough world building exercise as the Chronicle.
It’s uh, I’d say a 50% art book and 50% universe handbook.
Part of the book's approach was to use a wide body of artists.
And the idea was to get a broad, sort of survey, of stylistic approaches. So some of the art is whimsical,
some of it is really edgy type stuff that you might see on the cover of a Heavy Metal album cover,
others is what’d you consider more classic sort of concept illustration.
What’s special about this is that there’s art on every single page.
You have the text, but a picture is worth a thousand words, so having the two of them in conjunction
with each other really gives people an idea of what the Underworld and Court of the Dead is all about.
I think the level of, you know, detail and artistry in those statues comes across just as strong, if not stronger,
within the words of the story and the 2D art that goes with it to tell the story or illustrate the story.
We’ve spent two years on this book for a reason, and I think that’s what we’ve been very successful
in doing here, is helping each other bring our different perspectives to light
in this uniformed and very exciting way.
Seeing the summation of all these efforts coalesce into an actual, tangible artifact
is something I look forward to with a lot of delight.
It has been incredibly rewarding for me, personally, to get to experience this culture of art and artists
all working together towards such a single and singular goal that everyone is so passionately dedicated about.
It’s inspiring.
This book will really be the heart of what this experience can be.
The Chronicle Book represents a first step, but it’s going to be the first step of many
into the world of original IP that I think is going to force people to look at Sideshow
a little bit differently than they have in the past.