Monthly Archives: August 2011

August 24, 2011

Biscuits and Davey

I’ve been brush­ing up on After Effects and started play­ing around mak­ing title cards. I’ll snoop around for tips and tuto­ri­als for a while and ran­domly, but not usu­ally, come across some unex­pected inspiration.

Enter: Bis­cuits and Davey

Dur­ing my search for tuto­ri­als I stum­bled upon this inspired take on the intro cred­its to Short Cir­cuit:

Orig­i­nal opening:

This was done as a school project by Dave Mason who is Bis­cuits and Davey. I’m not exactly sure when this was made, but regard­less I think it’s inno­v­a­tive and very well put together and I would love to see more. I’m assum­ing this was also cre­ated with inspi­ra­tion from the Jus­tice DVNO video.

And just for fun here is an old mak­ing of doc­u­men­tary show­ing some of the behind the scenes con­struc­tion of the orig­i­nal Johnny Five robot.

August 14, 2011

Home Planet DVD Cover Art

Above is the final con­cept art for the DVD cover of my doc­u­men­tary short, Home Planet. In my pre­vi­ous post I dis­cussed cer­tain ideas and influ­ences involved in the process of cre­at­ing the cover, and now, with Karl’s tremen­dous help, we have a final product.

Here are some of the cover ideas we kicked around that evolved into the final design:

Cover Idea 1

Karl sent this image over after watch­ing the doc­u­men­tary and it set us in motion. We both agreed this wasn’t the right con­cept and needed a stronger illus­tra­tion, but we liked the place­ment of Mars and the type. We decided we needed a stronger, more per­sonal illustration.

Cover Idea 2

This idea gave a lit­eral glimpse into the cli­max of the story. It’s a moment that the doc­u­men­tary builds to and bet­ter left dis­cov­ered. Although it is more per­sonal, this con­cept was too heavy handed and we ruled it out.

Cover Idea 3

I liked the ini­tial map idea and so we revis­ited it, but this time empha­sized Mars and my trek film­ing between New York, Den­ver and Wash­ing­ton. I like the sim­plic­ity a lot, but again, the design was not per­sonal enough and did not rep­re­sent the doc­u­men­tary faithfully.

Cover Idea 4

I felt that we were onto some­thing with the global Mars idea from before. Karl and I dis­cussed options for another com­pli­men­tary image that could ele­vate the design into some­thing more per­sonal. Dur­ing our brain­storm I decided to reduce Mars and turn it into a scale model globe, a per­son­al­ized object that still height­ened the idea of a jour­ney. We even­tu­ally paired this with a sil­hou­ette image of me and felt we were close to bal­anc­ing some­thing per­sonal with some­thing bold and min­i­mal that speaks to the themes of the documentary.

Final Cover Close

The sil­hou­ette invited room to play around. The first thing I thought of was to add some sort of celes­tial type of tex­ture and we went with it. When Karl sent me his inter­pre­ta­tion of what I wanted he added an inter­est­ing, sub­tle addi­tion around the heart of the sil­hou­ette. I really liked the way it cor­re­sponded with the trek marks on the globe and it con­tin­ued to per­son­al­ize the cover expe­ri­ence. We decided this was the right one.

August 4, 2011

DVD Cover Art Inspiration

Paul Teb­bott

Paul Teb­bott

Paul Teb­bott

Paul Teb­bott

Paul Teb­bott

Paul Teb­bott

Paul Teb­bott

I am cur­rently in the process of pack­ag­ing DVD art­work for Home Planet to ship out to fes­ti­vals this fall with the help of my good friend and designer, Karl Peter­son. I knew before we started that I wanted to pur­sue some­thing with bold col­ors and big sym­bols; some design or illus­tra­tion that not only rep­re­sents, but height­ens the themes of my project. I remem­bered book­mark­ing Paul Tebbott’s work after see­ing it on the IS050 Blog some­time ago. The designs are clean and min­i­mal and have lit­tle if any tex­ture at all. The illus­tra­tions also reflect a form of sim­plic­ity with only few strong color choices.

Tebbott’s work reminded me of cer­tain Cri­te­rion DVD cov­ers I’ve seen over the years and the sim­i­larly restrained forms of design they have implemented.

Here are just a few examples:

Jonathan Demme, Some­thing Wild

Jacques Tati, Trafic

Robert Alt­man, Short Cuts

More could be said regard­ing the use of type, but it’s the direct­ness of the design work that I’m drawn to.

I plan to post the final prod­uct that Karl and I come up with and some of the rough ideas that didn’t make the cut as we con­tinue the process.

August 2, 2011

Twixt

Fran­cis Ford Cop­pola recently announced a live-remix tour of his lat­est film project, Twixt.  A 30-city live tour in which he, the film’s com­poser, Dan Dea­con, and pos­si­bly other col­lab­o­ra­tors will cre­ate a new, unique ver­sion of Twixt on the fly using an iPad-based edit­ing sys­tem that allows him to shuf­fle and remix sequences, shorten and lengthen edits, and var­i­ous other things that Cop­pola says will demon­strate “the evolv­ing tech­nol­ogy of the cinema.”

I like the idea of a road­show tour and I am intrigued by Coppola’s ambi­tious plans to remix his film live. Twixt seems like a campy thriller and maybe that will lend itself to the remix expe­ri­ence or maybe not. Appar­ently the story was inspired by an alcohol-induced dream he had in Turkey.

What can this exper­i­ment with cut­ting edge tech­nol­ogy and per­for­mance do for the lan­guage of cin­ema and for inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers and video artists? I really won­der what kind of influ­ence this could have com­ing from Cop­pola who car­ries so much clout as a film­maker. It’s a big risk, which I think is what is most excit­ing for him and his col­lab­o­ra­tors. I’m curi­ous to keep an ear out on the reac­tions as the tour rolls out.