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.

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!

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…!