Let me see if I have understood correctely:
1) You used to work in something that, if I have understood correctly, had nothing whatsoever to do with the 1/6 business.
2) If not an artist, I want to believe that you are a hardcore 1/6 collector who, being in HK, happened to be pretty well connected to the 1/6 design/manufacturing scene.
3) I also want to believe that you have had some experience in Project Management. Otherwise, those American hyperprofessional entrepreneurs, obsessed as they are with all that, would never have given you such a crytical responsibility.......
4) You seem to love Star Trek. Just a little bit. Just.
5) In 2014, you learnt QMx had the licence(...?).
6) You got your act together and in 2016 (QMx waiting for 2 years??? Way too long, right?) you somehow contacted them and made them hire you.
7) The rest is 1/6 History.
8) The reasons for the blackout and aaaaall these negotiations you told us about, are still beyond me... Will you tell us someday? Or it was just "not enough sales"?
Now, let me know just how wrong I am wrt all the above. ;-)
AND TELL US MOOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!
The 1/6 industry is such a huge unkown to me yet.....
Something that makes me wonder a lot: OK QMx gets the licence from Paramount(?). Does the licenser help the licencee, or the latter's contract manufacturer (that is, you) by providing abundant design data? Do you guys have access to extremely cool pictures of, say the uniforms, or even the original design data, so that you only have to scale them down? Do you get detailed data of the props? Do you guys have to trip down to the licencer' facilities to capture all data needed? Or you just pull pictures from the net and just go by that?
Another part of the process that really keeps me speculating is the whole approval process: you have to get licencee (QMx) approval, then the licencee must get licencer approval? Do you go down to the licencer, along with the QMx guys, to get feedback? Are there iterations? Are they hard to please?
OMG I can go on for days: how do you schedule a project for a figure? What goes first? And second? What happens simultaneously? How many artists and how much time to do a single prototype? How do you guys go about when the time comes to convert the proto into a long and ultraprecise manufacturing process description, where even the tiniest paint application is exhaustively written down? How do you choose the factory that will do the production run? Are there many in HK, or only a few that everybody use, even HT/SSC? How do you decide how big the run must be, that is, how do you assess some figure's sellability? What kind of training do factory workers go through, to be able to replicate what the extremely skillful prototyping artists did? Are they artists themselves, maybe younger ones?
Yeap, that's crazy.... you don't have to answer any of the above, of course....
Finally: I am after the TWOK set. That's my stake on this. Any schedule? The protos we have seen at exhibitions, are they final? For such an iconic point in the franchise, will we have little nice extras, such as Spock's lovely black meditation robe? (seen in both TMP and TWOK)
Thanks,
m.
