This was the case with Natalie Heeley’s project. A self-made success story and an inspiration to thousands of Mums, with some nudging from our friends at The Audio Suite, she decided to release one of her books as a high quality audio book CD set to really stand out above the crowd.

To ooze the quality she wanted, she hired a proper photographer for the product packaging, and commissioned us to create the digipack artwork, disc art, and for the CD mastering using the crafted recordings from The Audio Suite. Rather than go for a normal 4 panel digipack, Natalie wanted a 6 panel digipack to hold the 2 CDs.

Once all artwork was approved, we replicated 5,000 CDs in these special packages for her – 2 CDs, 6 panel digipacks printed full colour and with matt lamination for extra ‘ooooh’, each individually shrinkwrapped ready for sale.

Needless to say, she could not have been more pleased with the finished CDs.

While they have hundreds on on-demand films available, they took hold of The Woman and wanted to do something really special with it: release a tangible version!

The new from the outset what they wanted. DVD and Blu-ray releases. But this wasn’t our usual project. There was much to do, much to organise, and logistics to handle – all with a tight and specific deadline with a public launch date.

So after receiving huge HD files, artwork and more from the Horror Show, we got cracking careful with super high quality HD and SD encoding for Blu-ray and DVD. Although there was also quite a lot of Extras to go on the discs, it wasn’t too bad – we were creating the content for dual-layer discs for both formats, so BD50 and DVD9 to maximise quality.

We sorted layout and authoring of the menus, again for each of the two required outputs, so HD and SD versions, and their submenus / pop-up menus. Once all the authoring was completed, we shipped physical check discs to The Horror Show to check and approve.

The Blu-rays were the leading product on this occasion. So while we were very pleased to replicate 1,000 DVD9 retail-ready movie packages, the Blu-rays actually had 5,200 discs replicated. These were divided up then between some simpler packages, plus standard Blu-ray retail-discs in blue cases, plus a limited run of steelbook cases that the Horror Show had already produced. With these all manufactured, some advertising inserts printed and fulfilled and everything ready, it was then on to the logistics.

The 1,000 DVDs and 1,000 of the Blu-rays were shipped to a Sony fulfillment centre in the London area, adhering to some strict pallet preparations so that they would be accepted.

Then 4,200 Blu-rays were packed into the steelbooks with some other materials, shrinkwrapped and then 1,300 of these were shipped overnight to Guernsey to arrive at the warehouse for Zavvi, where the main promoted sales push was handled, with the listing still visible here so you can go ahead and buy your copy! The remaining discs were also shipped to Sony and The Horror Show themselves for other distribution.

The Woman was a thoroughly enjoyable project to work on – both the creation of and the production and logistics. We were honoured to be involved in the project. The Horror Show’s main man, David (who isn’t scary) had this to say about teaming with us: “It was a steep learning curve to be sure! But you made it extremely painless.”

Great stuff!

With advice from Neil Hillman, he recorded multiple hours worth of material from his alrady-released book over at The Audio Suite, who edited this down into a professional audio recording. Four CDs worth…!

We were tasked we mastering the discs for replication, designing the layout of the 8 panel digifile to match Wes’ physical book, and to create disc art similarly.

To be ready for a major event where Wes would be speaking, our factory produced 10,000 CDs in these disc packages. Wes received a couple of pallets’ worth of discs and did not look back as his authority has grown!

The Caffeine Partnership in London had already been working with Nissan for a while when they were looking for an affordable team for their DVD authoring and replication requirements.

On this occasion we had to carefully encode the films about the Nissan Qashqai model, plus design and author a working menu to play the elements from. There were language choices (for each of the destinations) and a chapters menu. After this was approved we then moved on to disc replication. This time it was 6,000 DVD5 discs in a slimline jewel case with a double-sided insert.

The bigger challenge lay in the logistics to get the discs on time, with a 3-way split delivery to Sunderland UK, Spain, and Russia. Everything was pretty smooth except for the shipment to Russia which got stuck at Russian Customs for far too long. There was nothing we could do to speed things up there, so we were literally stuck in the hands of Russian officials.

However, aside from this shipment issue, everything else went superbly, and the relevant people were impressed with the finished discs.

It centres around the story of Fatima (Portugal), where in 1917 a modern miracle is believed to have occurred.

Three children there saw the Virgin Mary who spoke to them, along with some other sights that only they could see. For a long time they were mocked, as nobody believed them.

Since the project began, it grew from its short film roots, into a full feature length piece – being Directed by Dom & Ian Higgins and Produced by Natasha Howes.

The film has become somewhat of an international phenomenon in the religious circles.

Our team were asked to come on board, with a brief that followed the pattern of the film itself. It started small, and grew into something much more huge!

Initially, we were doing some basic encoding and DVD duplication of a copy of the film for the cast and crew. But later, we actually got involved with authoring the full feature DVD with menus (in 8 languages), subtitles, disc design, cover design, 24 page booklet design, and DVD replication! Not only this, but we also needed to author the disc twice – once for the PAL (mainly European) market, and again in NTSC format (covering mainly the USA).

But – we didn’t stop at that.

At the same time, we were also responsible for designing the film’s promotional poster (in 2 sizes); two mug designs; two T-shirt designs; taking care of blowing up small images into large-scale print sizes (see the shop front window – the black & white images of the three children are blown up from genuine archive photos of the real children); and around 30 designs and layout for large-scale monolith prints (again with 8 languages) for the exhibition in Fatima itself. It was great fun working on all this, but even better to see photos of the full-size prints!

To top it off, we had to get everything to Fatima so that The 13th Day team could set up their shop, exhibition and everything else in time for the beginning of the festival there (starting on May 13th), especially as the Pope himself would be there during the first week, and driving right past their location!

So, we got 55,000 retail-ready PAL DVDs replicated and shipped there, 5,000 NTSC versions; 500 A2 and 500 A4 posters delivered; 250,000 full colour folded leaflets printed and delivered there; 5,000 prints of 13 different postcard designs each; 2,500 branded envelopes for the postcards; and digital files over to local printers there to take care of the merchandise and monolith printing.

It was great!

Apparently when everything got there and the guys were setting things up, the weather became pretty freezing…. Well, you can’t have everything right…!