Backs & Forth — A Writer Tackles Her First Set of Trading Card Backs
I know the secret formula. The secret to writing great card backs. I got the secret from Gary Gerani himself. Mr. Cardcopy. The King of Card Backs. We were talking on the telephone and he offered to enlighten me.
“Meg,” he said. “Let me tell you the Gary Gerani formula. The one I’ve been using for more than thirty years.”
He lowered his voice. I clutched the telephone between my shoulder and my ear, my fingers hovering over the keyboard of my laptop, poised to take down every word of the Gary Gerani secret formula.
Now, you’re probably wondering why I was chatting with Gary Gerani on the telephone. (Actually, you’re probably wondering what the secret formula is, but you don’t really expect me to reveal that right off the bat, do you?) I contacted Gerani to get his advice on card backs because I’d just accepted a new writing assignment: writing the copy for the story cards for Hercules & Xena: The Animated Adventures, a card set based on the movie Hercules & Xena: The Battle for Mt. Olympus.
I’m a freelance writer. I write newspaper and magazine articles – usually about wedding flowers or landscape architecture – and the odd essay about my son’s trading card collecting habits. I’ve never written trading card backs. So I did what every writer does when confronted with a subject she knows nothing about. I procrastinated. Then I researched. I asked questions. I contacted the experts who might answer the pivotal question: what the heck am I doing?
What Do Collectors Want?
The first question I asked was: what do collectors want from the backs of their cards? I started with a quick surf through Card Talk on the NSU website, where I learned that collectors want entertaining, informative and, perhaps most important, accurate card backs. My experts concurred.
“Great copy really enhances a card set,” agrees Charles Novinskie. “Early cards had next to no copy, one or two sentences, if that [.] Over the years, as fans became more savvy, they were looking for more informative, in-depth, accurate copy.” Novinskie, a NSU contributor (see his article “The Birth of the Trading Card: From Concept to Consumer” in this issue) and life-long comic book collector who’s been in the entertainment card industry for more than a decade, has written card backs for sets based on The Simpsons, Terminator, Lion King, Megaman, and Finding Nemo, as well as all three Lord of the Rings sets for ArtBox.
For story cards based on a movie, good copy means more than spelling the characters’ names right (misspellings is a big pet peeve of fans and collectors, I discovered). It also means telling the story correctly and putting the images on the front and back of the cards in the context of the plot.
“The copy tells the plot,” say Gerani, a 30-year veteran of the industry (and very familiar with Xena and Hercules, since he’s worked on products based on the characters, including Topps’s Xena Magazine, where he served as editor for the first issues). “The key is to keep the plot moving, because that’s what your images are doing.”
Research, research, research
How to accomplish this? The first step, according to my experts, is to know everything about the subject of the card set. A little problem for me, since I know next to nothing about Hercules and Xena, or this movie. Not to worry, says Novinskie, as “research is the best substitute for overwhelming knowledge on the subject.” He recommends the internet.
I Googled. I “IMDb’ed” (the verb for searching the Internet Movie Database site IMDb.com). Although there was a lot of information about the characters, there wasn’t much more than a synopsis about this particular movie. I exhausted my research options in about half an hour and knew only a little more about the story. Time to watch the DVD.
Remote in Hand
My next step was getting acquainted with the story, so I began by watching the movie in its entirety. Novinskie suggested I watch the movie with remote in hand so I could pause and make notes.
My first viewing went like this. Opening credits and song – what are those things singing? Some sort of female mythical creature? Pause. Note to self: find out what those are. Play. Nice song. Maybe I better listen to the words. Okay, it’s a prologue of sorts; it explains the story. Better replay. What were those words again? Replay again.
Next come the character names. Pause. Note to self: make a list of character names and correct spellings. Play.
And so it went. Pause and play. Stop and replay. Pages of notes to myself. My first viewing of the 90 minute movie took me over three hours. I laughed (there was some funny dialogue). I cried (when I had to replay the same scene two or three times to understand the story). But by the end I knew the plot and could identify most of the characters by name.
Now all I had to do was tell the story in 72 separate paragraphs that matched the images on the front and back of the cards.
The Gerani Secret Formula
“Follow your nose,” advises Gerani. “The product is a collection of images. Basically, you’re threading the pictures together. For movies, just tell your story.”
That’s the Gary Gerani secret formula? In a nutshell, yes. But there’s a little more.
“The way I like to think about it, these cards are in plastic sheets of nine, in a binder,” explains Gerani. “Think of it as designing pages of nine after nine cards. I like to start off with the title card. Maybe poster artwork back and front. A little introduction, like a book cover. Then I might do character profiles, so the rest of the eight on the first page are character cards. Then you get to the story cards. You just tell the story. You go right through it. After that, you might add some extra elements, a page of something to zip it up. But as long as you’ve got your story cards, the set will flow.”
The story cards were my assignment. So, with the card images on one side of me and the remote on the other, I started watching the movie again, scene by scene, sometimes frame by frame, to capture the story for each card back. 72 cards. 90 minutes of movie. I lost track of how many the hours I spent writing the first drafts of the card copy.
Making the Copy Fit the Cards
When I finished watching the movie again, I had copy for all 72 cards. But I was nowhere near being done. Some of the copy was too short; the images looked great but I couldn’t find much to say about the scene. Most of the copy was too long; there was so much going on in the scene that I had written hundreds of words. And I seemed to have transcribed half the movie’s dialogue verbatim.
The copy was also very rough. Most of it read like this:
“You guys asked for it,” warns G. X and G in some kind of bar, being heckled by blue half-goat-looking guys. (What are those? Need to find out). X takes bag of stolen gold from head blue guy. X takes care of blue guys with some fancy throwing of her chakrum (check spelling). Suddenly Ares appears.
How could I clean up the copy and distill it into the three or four sentences – 50 or so words – that would fit on each card back? Luckily for me, Gerani had advice on that too.
“Do the logical thing,” he says. If you’re telling the story, you want it to be an ongoing, card-to-card experience. Your last sentence should sum up the action and lead you on to the next card.”
And the pages of dialogue I’d transcribed?
“You can’t let precious dialogue go by without making use of it,” agrees Gerani. “But you have to remember that you’re telling a story and the main thing is to convey the next step in the story. You tell the story and if you have the fun dialogue, you use it.”
I went back to the DVD. Paying careful attention to the card images, I went through the movie scene by scene again, editing the copy, picking out the best dialogue and, following Gerani’s advice, making the story flow from card to card.
The Titan Is in the Details
But I still wasn’t finished. I needed to double-check the spelling of character names, places and objects (Xena’s weapon is a chakram, not chakrum).
And I had a few holes in my copy.
The bad guys in the movie are the four Titans – two males and two females. Each Titan has the power of a particular element: earth, air, water and fire. The list of characters and voice talents includes the names of the Titans, but only one of the Titans is regularly addressed by name in the movie. I could figure out which of the two male Titans was which, but I had no clue which name belonged to which female Titan. I had been calling them “fire gal” and “water gal” but I didn’t think that would go over too well with the collectors. Unable to figure it out any other way, I reviewed every scene the female Titans appeared in until – aha! – in one mumbled bit of dialogue, the name of “fire gal” was revealed!
Finished at Last!
How did I do with my first card copy assignment? The fans and collectors will be the final judges of that question. Writing good card copy is harder than I thought it would be, but I learned a lot from the experience. And I’d take on another assignment if one came my way.
There is one thing I never found out, though. Who are those blue, half-goat men anyway? |
