Epic Yarns.

It’s a pleasant Saturday morning for a walk to Granville Island, where I'm attending a talk by children's book creator Holman Wang as part of the annual Vancouver Writers Fest.  The front of the stage is decorated with samples of his work: fuzzy figures from Star Wars, and felt copies of him, his two children, and their dog.

Holman and his brother Jack collaborate in the creation of early reading primers that are intended for parents to read with their children.  Jack writes the stories, and Holman creates felted figures and settings that he then photographs as illustrations for the books.  The brothers got their start with the Cozy Classics series, featuring literary mainstays such as Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Huckleberry Finn, followed by Epic Yarns, a three-book retelling of the first Star Wars trilogy.

Obviously I've chosen to attend Wang's talk because of the Star Wars books, but their other creations are equally impressive.

I was initially curious as to how the brothers handled the process of adapting the stories for younger readers - after all, Moby Dick is hardly written for the pre-school crowd, and  the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke's hand is cut off by his father must be a bit traumatic for very young readers.

 

As it turns out, Holman and his brother strip the stories to their most essential components:  12 pictures, 12 words.  Rewriting the stories is Jack Wang's most crucial contribution to the process, along with steadfastly maintaining the integrity of the concept. I don't envy him the writing - it may sound easy to write a 12-word book, but I can easily imagine the difficulty of selecting 12 words that are both appropriate to the stories and accessible to small children.* 

 

After the writing is finished, Holman begins work on the elements for the photo illustrations. Each needle-felted figure takes him between 20 and 60 hours to create.  Holman, an entertaining and witty speaker, does a comically quick demo of the felting process, and comments that for felting, "Self harm is an occupational hazard."

"If I had a dollar for every time I’ve stabbed myself, it might be more than the royalties on the books."

 

The craftsmanship is extraordinary - the figures are about ten inches tall, created at about 1:7 scale. It's even more extraordinary considering that, when his brother initially approached him with the idea, Holman had never done felting - as he casually explains, his entire training is based upon "watching some YouTube™ videos".

The figures are constructed around wire armatures to give them some strength and to allow the figures to be posed for different settings.  In the case of the Star Wars books, Wang decided to make interchangeable heads and place them onto differently costumed bodies for different scenes out of the films, so that the faces would be consistent from image to image. In addition, he sometimes includes natural materials to create specific effects, such as uncombed sheep's wool for the Cowardly Lion's mane in their Wizard of Oz adaptation.

 

To simplify the process, he makes some of the clothing using sheets of felt, which he also uses for props such as Luke's X-Wing, constructed from styrene and bits of junk, and then covered in felt.  For larger figures such as Jabba the Hut or Luke's Tauntaun from Hoth, Wang carves rough figures in styrofoam, then works the wool directly into the foam.

For the backdrops to his felted figures, he builds sets that range from the simple to the complicated, "Macgyvering things together" and using elements like real fires in fireplaces, or dry ice for the Dagobah mists, in order to make the environments as realistic as possible.

In addition to creating studio sets, Holman also likes to shoot on location so that the scenes have natural skies and real backgrounds.  He jokes about wanting to shoot the SNOW image for The Empire Strikes Back, which features Luke Skywalker on a Tauntaun, on Seymour Mountain, but being unable to find a setup without trees in the background.  He ended up taking the final photo in front of a grimy snowpile in the parking lot, with the happily accidental result that the dirt and salt in the out of focus snow gave shading and texture to what would otherwise have been basically just a flat white background.

Generally the location photos have been taken locally in Vancouver, where the Lynn Valley stands in for the forest moon of Endor.  The sole exception hs been a desert shoot in Arizona's Yuma Desert, where the original movie scenes set on Tatooine and featuring Jabba's sail barge and the Sarlac were shot for The Return of the Jedi.

 

Wang's photographs are created almost entirely without resorting to Photoshop, relying instead on practical effects to set the scene - although Holman made an exception for the light saber effect for the Star Wars books.  He utilizes a variety of tricks and techniques to achieve the effects he wants, such as forced perspective to add in real background elements, and physically dragging backgrounds to create blur during long exposure times.

To date, Holman has done 17 books using these techniques: 12 Cozy Classics, three Star Wars, and a pair of books about the multiple jobs performed by parents on a daily basis: Great Job, Mom and Great Job, Dad.  These last two feature him and his family as characters, although he admits to claiming their two children for Great Job, Dad.  He deadpans, "My wife got the dog."  Alert readers will note that the Great Job books feature scale versions of Holman's other books as props.

When asked what his favourite was out of these projects, Holman admits that he enjoyed making the Star Wars books the most, because the movies were so much a part of his childhood.

 

"It was a chance to relive my childhood, and I was super excited to become part of the Star Wars universe in some small way."**

He also points to the Star Wars books as an example of successful self-marketing, or, as Holman puts it, "Sometimes you have to make your own breaks."

While exhibiting at the annual Bologna Children's Book Fair in Italy, the brothers made contact with Chronicle Books, a San Francisco based publishing house.  Chronicle asked if they had any projects they'd like to pursue, and they immediately expressed their desire to adapt the Star Wars movies.  Chronicle approached Lucasfilm on their behalf, and to the surprise of the Wangs, Lucasfilm gave their conditional permission for the project, but requested a sample.  Holman created a felted version of Luke Skywalker, and Lucasfilm gave the go-ahead for the books.

 

Holman was surprised by the degree to which Lucasfilm left the two brothers alone, to the point of not actually providing very much support out in terms of figuring out how to create the iconic figures and scenes from the films.  One of their few edits was to the page featuring Han Solo encased in carbonite: Jack Wang had chosen the word FROZEN for the image, but the Keeper of the Holocron, as the Lucasfilm Star Wars database manager is commonly known, vetoed it - apparently the carbonite process is hot, rather than cold.*** 

 

In conclusion, Wang discussed how his work on the books has allowed him to express his identity through creativity, and helped him with the struggle between wanting to be creative and the need to have a regular job.

For his next project, Wang is writing a middle-grade novel, commenting, "I have no training as a writer, but then, I became famous as a felt artist without training."

"People should pursue their dreams.  If you have an idea and a passion, just run with it - who knows what will happen?"

- Sid

* I take minor exception with one of the single-word story choices as displayed during Wang's talk:  Droids.  Even speaking as a science fiction fan, I think that there would have to be something that was more of a household word to which a youthful reader could be introduced. (Although I guess it would depend on your household.)

** Presumably no pun was intended.

*** If you, like me, think of that as the carbon freeze scene, apparently we're both wrong.