Yes, it’s already past midnight in London and, therfore, the big day is already at hand.
Friday, Prince William — second in line to be king of England — will marry Kate Middleton in what’s been called a storybook wedding.
As for myself: Yes, I’m already tired of hearing about this. Not quite as tired as these guys, perhaps, but still.
A number of papers have produced elaborate graphics giving readers a preview of what to expect on the wall-to-wall-television-coverage we’ll be getting Friday. And since I have access to only two of these, those are the two I’ll now show you.
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WASHINGTON POST
Washington, D.C.
Average daily circulation: 545,345
Alberto Cuadra, Sohail Al-Jamea, Karen Yourish and Laris Karklis
Very few newspapers build graphics to as high a standard as does the Washington Post. The Post‘s stuff is always clean, crisp, immaculately researched and edited and immaculately presented.
Their royal wedding piece is no exception. This ran as a full-page graphic in Thursday’s paper, says Alberto Cuadra.
Click for a much, much larger look.
Alberto writes on his Flickr page:
[The] model [was] created in Lightwave 3d and put together in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
And the Post team spared no detail at all, down to the little chairs lined up in the transepts.
Note the smart, monochromatic color scheme that allows the artists to keep your eye moving to where the action will be and away from all the ornate details in the walls.
Can you imagine the time that must have gone into modeling all this? I can’t.
Downpage is a separate piece that shows the royal carriage and then the parade route, superimposed onto a satellite photo of downtown London.
Wonderful stuff.
The strength of using all that 3D rendering, of course, is that you can then use it in video or multimedia graphics. Here is the online version of that same graphic.
The Post also built some fun stuff. Here is an interactive game that allows you to test your knowledge of royal weddings and to guess who might make the best royal couples.
Find the Post‘s royal wedding blog here. Find a directory of all the Post‘s royal wedding stories here.
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RAPPORT
Johannesburg, South Africa
Average weekly circulation: 325,807
Jaco Grobbelaar and Arlene Prinsloo
Meanwhile — an entire ocean away — my friends in South Africa are also going ga-ga over Friday’s wedding.
Arlene Prinsloo — the typographical editor for the Media24 chain of newspapers — is a big-time Anglophile and a huge, huge fan of William’s mom, the late, great Lady Diana. Artist Jaco Grobbelaar is an extraordinarily talented visual journalist who has had the benefit of — ahem — some truly great graphics instruction and consulting. (Read more about Jaco’s work here and here and here and here and here.)
The two of them teamed up to build this full-page graphic that ran in Rapport, the big nationally-distributed Sunday newspaper.
Click, of course, for a much larger view.
There’s all sorts of stuff packed in there. The same kind of info on Westminster Abbey we saw in the Post and a map of the parade route, of course. But also brief bios on the royal couple and a timeline of other royal weddings held in the Abbey.
Keep in mind that South African newspaper pages are physically much wider than most U.S. pages. So in fact, the page isn’t quite as crowded as it looks here.
Also, you can’t quite get the enjoyment intended out of this because it’s in Afrikaans. For City Press – an English-language Sunday paper also published by Media24 — Jaco and Arlene built this tabloid-sized variant.
Because Jaco didn’t plan to use his Abbey diagram as lead art for the page, he didn’t put quite the level of detail into his rendering.
Yet, the final product still works. His content is good. And he, too, uses careful use of a limited color palette here to keep the reader’s eye on the main action: The wedding itself.
Jaco probably used satellite imagery to build his map, but he rendered everything by hand.
In particular, I love the little timeline across the bottom. Charles and Diana are not included because they didn’t get married in Westminster Abbey — they got married in St. Paul’s Cathedral instead.
In addition, Jaco sent me a few other graphic pieces he built that ran in the various Media24 papers this week. Here’s a cool schedule of Friday’s events.
During summer, London is only one hour behind South African time. So my friends back there will be able to watch Friday’s events at a time of day that’s not insanely early.
The ceremony itself begins at 6 a.m. Eastern Time. Which is another reason I won’t be watching this.
And finally, there’s this diagram explaining the ceremonial flyover the Royal Air Force will perform after the couple rides to Buckingham Palace.
Leading the way will be a World War II-vintage bomber and fighters. This will happen at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. Still too damned early for my tastes.
While Jaco’s role in all this is done — I’m sure he’s moved on to his next cool project — Arlene’s still in the thick of it. She flew to London this week and — even as I write this — she’s camped out on the parade route.
You see here there with her sleeping bag, a South African flag (gotta show the colors), her cell phone and her iPad. What else do you need, really?
For weeks now, she’s been writing about the royal wedding and preparations for her trip in a weekly column in My Tyd (“My Time”), a magazine inserted into Rapport.
She’s blogging, tweeting and uploading pictures. The downside (for we Americans): It’s all in Afrikaans.
For the record, though, here’s her royal wedding blog. Here’s her royal wedding Twitter account. And here’s her regular Twitter account.
So there ya go. Two separate organizations. Two approaches. Both cool.
For those of you who plan to watch the royal wedding: Enjoy.
For those of you who do not plan to watch: Enjoy.
