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Cost is a real issue with home printing (or Kinkos). We had to print out 10 sets of our new Slocum script which is made of 96 single side printed office paper sheets and 20 color pages with illustrations, printed on good quality paper. We had the text pages printed at Kinkos but printed the color plates ourselves on Sandra's top level consumer printer (an Epson 1800 photo-stylus, large paper) and had the complete sets bound with spiral bindings and plastic covers again at Kinkos. All this came to about $450 in costs of materials and outside services, which comes to $ 45 a book. This does not include our labor involving the time printing the color plates, four trips to Kinkos, stuffing the color plates between the printed sheets, each at the proper page and packaging and taking to the post office -- it would have come to many, many hours if we had counted our time spent with this small project. Of course I have not included the costs involved with writing and illustrating the script, but that's paid by the producer within the film's budget.

So it's not a small thing to ask someone to print out their own books -- or to have your own books printed professionally. Very expensive if it's in small quantities no matter how you choose to do it.

Dear Anton,

I realy like the clip of Jazzed and it makes me longing for more!

Here is another idea.
Could it be there was a jazz tune of Monk playing in the background?
How about involving the big audience of Jazz lovers?
How about to persuade the music label of that tune to combine a Monk CD with your film as a special?

All the best for your distribution,
Vera

Paul: Whoa, that's expensive! Just for fun I calculated your numbers for my favourite digital copy shop in Berlin, and the complete booklet comes out at 17.- €, in good paper quality. Even with a luxourious binding it wouldn't exceed 25.- €. But I guess that printing in USA is twice as expensive as it is here, judging from my experience with Nina Paley's posters.

But this is only the kind of booklet good enough to send to producers or festivals. A book which goes with a DVD needs a better print quality, which means offset printing, and that's only worth the trouble with a print run of about 250 copies. Everything less needs to be done by digital printing, which is just a (good) colour laser printer. This is the production process behind books on demand, it's good enough for scientific essays or special interest books, but not good enough for any coffeetable book - the artwork deserves to be printed in best quality available.

If you really want to produce a book by yourself: you can separate the jobs of printing and binding. In Germany we have lots of printers with excellent offers because they run their machines day and night and combine lots of jobs on a single sheet. (If you want to calculate such a sheet yourself, see here: http://www.laser-line.de/kalkulator/001 ... 0000000005). The printed sheets now can go to a specialised binding service.

Thanks, Marcus. Printing is an entirely separate and ancient domain which I will leave for others to get into once the distribution of Tulip gets onto a steady track. We have two more important festivals to attend; Toronto in September and Pusan, Korea in October, both of which have selected Tulip for their programs. Both of these festivals also have top reputations for attracting buyers and the press, Pusan is even billed as the Cannes of Asia. After attending these two festivals my producer will choose a distributor and then will be the time to worry about printing a book. But thanks for the information; I will keep it in storage.

nb : here is Anton frenglish interview :