Setting the Pages

 In order for me to fully visualise how the book will look and to help me with the planning of my looks and how they'll run through each story I felt that it was vital for me to create a basic book layout plan. I wanted to see which images looked best as double page spreads and which ones had enough character and depth to stand alone on a single page. I used secondary images to show mainly the composition of the imagery and how each image will sit in the book.









This exercise has been extremely useful in helping me to plan each shoot and the images I want to get from each shoot. Following this exercise I have made a shooting plan for each character so the photographer and myself are clear with the running order of the make-up and shots, I'm hoping this will help with the organisational elements of each shoot and look.

I'll also be using this book layout when it comes to designing my final book layout on InDesign, although this design is open to change and each photograph will have to go with the extracts of the stories that run along the images this will be the most helpful element as a starting point for my book design. 

As well as creating a book layout plan with images and directional text, I have also created a book template of the size book I am hoping to print. The book template is 12" x 12" and I choose this size as I felt it was big enough to fit an image clearly and with space for text and wasn't too big whereby it was uncomfortable to hold or handle. Some pages of the book will be images on a double page spread shown below whereby others will sit alone on a single page spread, others will have just text. I am also planning on having a title page for each fairy tale as well as a quote for each on the opposite page, I feel this will bring the concept of the book together and will be successful in creating a link from one story into another.

Although I originally felt happy with the size choice of the book, upon reflection and after some thought I feel that the book may be too large and that the images will be too small to fill the page, leaving a lot of empty black space and not utilising the whole of the book size. As I don't feel fully positive about the decision, I am yet to go ahead with choosing a final book size and I am currently in the process of deciding whether to choosing instead an average portrait sized book that is 8" x 10" as by sticking to an average sized book it is more in keeping with my competing horror novels and will be more appropriate and relevant for a book that could actually be sold in a shop, as the sizing of the book is easy to hold, carry and read.

In order to help a reading audience understand the concept of my book and to put my images into context, I have decided to include an introduction to my book. The introduction will firstly introduce fairy tales as a whole and how they are relevant to our society now, I will then go on to talk about where fairy tales derived from and how they originally came about. Following this I will start to bring in the idea of the darker side of fairy tales and here is where I will introduce and discuss the fairy tales written by the Grimm Brother's, describing the darker, more violent side to their tales.

Here I have written a first draft introduction for my book -

fairy tale - noun

A children's story about magical and imaginary beings and lands.

A term used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness.

But are fairy tales all that happy?

    The interpretations of fairy tales that circulate nowadays have evolved greatly from the original tales of the 1800’s. These re-creations now are very much about the ideal happy ending and the idea of finding true love with your Prince Charming, something that most single woman pine for. However the original tales that began to circulate in the 19^th century lacked the happy endings that we now associate with fairy tales, mainly because in reality, there were none. Through analysing the original tales it becomes apparent that these enchanting, lovable tales are actually filled with all sorts of power struggles, of money, women, children and land and are often set in a violent and gory plot. Many represented the huge divide at the time between that of the peasantry and the aristocracy and used symbols of violence and cruel punishments to express their conflicts and struggles.

     The fairy tale stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800s show us life as people knew it, capricious and often cruel.  So if you’re looking for a sweet, soothing tale to waft your child into dreamland? Then look elsewhere as these tales are not suitable children. The Grimm Brothers were German authors who together collected and published folklore. With their book ‘Children's and Household Tales’ they popularized some of our most well-known tales such as Cinderella, Snow White and Rapunzel all of which are now available in more than 100 translations and have been adapted by filmmakers such as, Walt Disney. However unlike the Disney remakes, the tales written by the Brothers Grimm were in actual fact quite morbid and frightening stories. They show us the darker side of fairy tales, marked by scenes of lurid violence, including graphic descriptions of incest, murder, mutilation and cannibalism; branded by both the clerical and the secular powers as damnable and inspired by the devil. In the corpus of the Grimm’s tales there are approximately 25 in which the main focus is on children who experience some form of abuse, whether it be starvation, incest or neglection. The brother’s began to recognise that their fairy tales were far from culturally innocent and even as they sought to remove traces of sexual and violent elements, they rarely exercised their prerogatives to tone down descriptions of brutal punishments as many of these elements still remain today. 

This book aims to show that unknown violent and dark side of fairy tales by using original storylines and plots of four of the Grimm’s fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel & Cinderella.