Frankie rolled her lips in to stop herself from laughing and interrupting the production.
Beryl carefully moved a large pot filled with water to the stove. “Now that our roast is in the oven, it’s time to boil our potatoes.”
Joyce added several large pinches of salt. “Be sure to season the water. We don’t want bland roasties.”
Beryl smiled. “That’s what we call them in England. You don’t have a name for them here, because you don’t make this kind of potato.”
Lucas laughed, looking at the camera. “She’s right, we don’t.” He paused a moment, then said, “Cut. All right, ladies, let’s take a short break until that water starts to boil.”
Frankie pulled her attention away and tried to focus on her tablet and the logo design she was working on for Stacy. As entertaining as the sisters and Lucas were, this was the perfect opportunity for Frankie to get a little work done. She at least wanted to make a start on the logo.
She began with a circle. Whether or not that circle would stay part of the design remained to be seen. But Frankie liked to start with some kind of border, because it gave her a sense of space. Stacy’s initials were SP. Frankie grabbed a basic sans serif S and P from the graphic software’s text box and placed them on the screen.
Then she opened a new browser window and searched for Alphonse Mucha. She looked through the images that came up and found a piece of his art that depicted one of the Greek goddesses. She used another bit of software to capture a color palette from that image.
The colors were beautiful, but muted. Stacy had told Frankie she wanted the colors to be a little more vibrant than what Mucha used, but with that feel. Still in that secondary software window, Frankie turned up the hue and saturation by a few degrees.
She studied the results. Still a bit pastel. She turned them up a few more degrees and nodded. That was better.
She copied that color palette and imported it into her design program. Next, she searched for Art Deco-style fonts.
She found a lot, but only a handful that spoke to her. She downloaded the sample fonts to try them out and loaded them into her design program as well.
Using the color palette, the new fonts, and the Art Deco feel of Mucha’s work, she began to incorporate those things into the logo.
She switched up the fonts, seeing which ones had the best-looking S and P. She played with the letters, moving them nextto each other, then slightly overlapping. She moved the P down so that the bottom curve of the S and the swoop of the P became one.
“That’s kind of nice.”
She jumped, so focused on her work she hadn’t realized Lucas was standing next to her. She laughed. “You startled me.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. How’s it going?”
“All right. I just started. Are you guys still on a break?” She looked into the kitchen where Joyce and Beryl were now making tea.
“We’re having tea,” Lucas said. “Can’t wear the stars out.”
“Definitely not. Are you happy with how it’s going?”
“Thrilled. These two are gold. I think they could very easily have their own show if they wanted it.”
“You really think they could manage the work that entails? All the technical stuff?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Probably not. They’d need help, I’m sure. Might be worth doing, though.”
“Or you could just host them here once in a while.”
He nodded. “I could. And I will. So long as they’re interested. I’d love to see what kind of following they could build. I guess we’ll find out what happens when this episode goes live.”
“Which will be when?”
“We have to finish filming, obviously. I’ll need to get some good, isolated video of the food to add in. Joyce and Beryl have promised to write up the recipes; those will have to be transcribed and scheduled to go onto my website. Then I have to edit everything together and somehow cut all of this footage down to forty minutes, tops. That will take most of a day. I’d say three days from now? Maybe four?”
“And then they’ll be stars.”
He laughed. “Something like that, yes. I’m going to use this episode to announce the new Scout merch, too.”
“I hope that does well.”
