Doctor Who - Book of Angels & Home Box

[Holluba]

Hi all, I'm new here. I joined yesterday.

For Christmas I received "The Visual Dictionary" and in it are a plethora of prop images, many of which I thought would be good for replicating. The thing that took my eye was the Ancient Book of Angels from the "Time of Angels" episode. It looks quite a simplistic piece to try and tackle, but I'm stumped on how to recreate the cover. I seem to remember that it was shaped and embossed leather, but this is a material that I've never worked with before. Does anyone have any advice that they could kindly give to tackle this side of the project please?

The inside has no pictures, it's just text, so that makes this side of the job easier. Of course once all this is done, it'll need binding and that is another subject that I'm going to go and have a read up on.

If I can't make the cover of the book to a convincing degree, I do have a fall back plan and that is to have a go at a different prop from the same episode. The Home Box. It's just a large black cube with two hemispherical indents, one on the front and the other on the rear. Should be easy.

The BBC official website has a few images of the concept art for these props, so I've copied them for reference and now the next thing to do is purchase the DVD of the episode to see if I can get any useful screen captures from it.

I see that people have recreated The Journal of Impossible Things book, but so far from my searches of the board, I've seen nothing on this particular topic, so hopefully this may be something a little different.

Cheers,

Holluba

 

[Risu]

Book binding takes quite a bit of practice to get right, especially for a design like that. If you really want to make that book, look up some binding tutorials online, they're are quite a few to choose from. For this particular cover, you'll probably need to take a tooling class at a local Tandy Leather or similar store, and show them pictures so they can help you figure it out. That being said, a Tandy won't carry the kind of leather you'll need for the cover, and you'll want to make a few practice books before this one. This is one of those props that to me is just more trouble than it's worth. The design is really complex and the prop was relatively insignificant. I did like the home box, though. It would definitely be the easier of the two to make.

 

[Holluba]

Thanks for your reply.

The book's cover looks rather like it's a very thin leather, laid over a board which appears to have some relief detailing on the surface, so I'd guess there's no "carving" required as such, more like the ability to glue the material to the board. This is why I thought it may be straight forward to achieve, but as I hinted in the previous post, I'm no expert as I'm just starting out in this area, ie; making a book from scratch. Again, this is something that I will need to do some research on.

I see what you mean by the notion that the prop was insignificant as it didn't have much screen time, but to give it it's due, it was rather significant in terms of the plot line. For me though, I just like the look of it. It's an old book and these things are always cool, at least to me at any rate.

There's obviously lots of research ahead of me now, not only for the production methods, but also the crucial sizing and details. Better get my skates on.

Holluba

 

[Risu]

Yea, no carving, just wet molding. In the case of books like that one, most likely done with a metal plate, not by hand. It could be done by hand, it would just be tricky to get it just right.

 

[Coz]

Hiya, and welcome!

If you're happy with a leather appearance, check out some of this guys tutorial here:
MRX Designs: Demo Book #1 (part 1)

Check his other postings too!

You could find an appropriatly old book (or just stack the pages from side-bound notebooks together & write in it yourself).

C.

 

[Holluba]

Thanks Coz for the link, it's an interesting read and uses a near identical technique that I used for an old art project that I did at school almost 20 years ago, something that I'd forgotten all about until I went to that page.

On a related note, I was looking at my wife's new handbag and the leather on that is very soft and supple. Having used a tassle, I noticed that with just a small amount of pressure, I could get it to form around a relief pattern. Now if I could lay my hands on some of this type of leather, I could test the theory out to see if it's a goer. Already I'm feeling quite confident in this respect, what I'm not so confident about now is the text for the inside pages. I'll probably look for some hand script font and just type out a load of gibberish, print it up, age it down and then look into binding it.