Dental Hygiene and Secret Identities

So you've all been reading my "Your New Favorite" posts at Geekweek, right? Well, this week's is a particular favorite, as it gives me an excuse to post this recently completed comic I did with the great Rachel Friere! It's a total departure from anything I've done before--it's comedy, it's all-ages appropriate, it's silent, it's even vaguely autobiographical--and as such I'm really quite taken with it. (Also because Rachel really knocked it out of the park in the art department!) Here's the story in it's entirety, in black & white... if you're going to be at MoCCA this year, I'll be selling a minicomic version of this, in color... assuming I find the time to color it between now and then.

Anyway, I hope you like it as much as I do--let me know in the comments section!

CHE

The first consideration for me in designing Steven Soderbergh's CHE was trying to figure out how to make a design for this film, as opposed to a design promoting Che Guevara the man, or Che the cultural icon. The iconic image of Che, originally a photograph by Alberto Korda but used and reused by so many artists and designers, is one of the most recognizable images in the world. The idea of Che is well known, but the film's project is to "humanize the icon"... which makes the icon the logical starting point.

It became clear to me pretty early on that we had to tackle that head on, to show the image you recognize, tweaked just enough to show that this isn't going to be exactly what you expect. We settled pretty quickly on the idea of reproducing the classic Che icon with Benicio del Toro's face in place of Che's. It seems like an obvious idea—so obvious, in fact, that I was shocked that it hadn't been used for the original theatrical campaign, apart from one rare French teaser poster—but effective, nonetheless.

The question, then, was how to execute that? The visual inspiration for the set design came from two sources: first, the color palate Soderbergh uses for the map sequences that open each of the two films:



And second, from Cuban and South American poster art:



Using a simple high contrast, street-arty style, I threw together a Che graphic pretty quickly, then tried a couple possible layouts:



But really anything fancy was just obscuring the central concept: that the face in the icon was Benicio del Toro's. The simpler the better, then:



The next question (or, really, a concurrent question) was where to go from there? CHE is broken up into two films, Part I and Part II, which meant I was going to need three covers: one for each film plus a slipcase.

My first thought was to treat each cover as a separate poster, drawing from some of the wildly varying styles of Cuban and South American revolutionary design. This proved a little too ambitious to execute... I never quite got anything that cohered well enough to be worth showing to anyone, but for you, loyal blog readers, I'll show a few. Stealing blatently from some of the examples shown above, I came up with these:



I have to say, I remember these being a little worse than they are, for the most part... I recall being really embarrassed by these at the time, for whatever reason, but a couple are alright on their own. Regardless, I couldn't find a way to make them cohere into a unified set, so I set all those aside to narrow the focus down to one style with three variations: expanding the icon to incorporate Che's early days in Cuba, in the more traditional 26 July movement uniform (before he started wearing the beret, at least in the film), and the end of his life in the Bolivian jungle, with long scraggly hair. It also gave me the opportunity to really highlight the colors, which quickly became the anchor for the set. Here's the two individual covers:



That basic concept was holding together pretty well, but then it came time to tweak the cover image. Soderbergh liked the concept, but wasn't happy with the execution of the slipcase cover—he had a number of comments, but the one that I remember most is that he didn't like the way I drew the lines on del Toro's forehead, which made it look like he smelled something funny. So over the course of a couple weeks, I tried a series of tweaks, some minor, some major, some alright, some really really bad. The difficulty was in trying to find a balance between conveying the right emotion, (defiance mixed with vulnerability), meshing well with the hair and hat from the original Che icon so it doesn't look too cobbled together, and just plain looking like del Toro. I did a lot, most of which got saved over at various points, but here's a few that survived:



You'll also notice I tweaked the red from the first round--which seemed just TOO obvious--to a subtler red-orange color, which I thought sat nicely next to the individual covers. Finally, we ended up here As I recall, the highlights in his eyes in that last version we what finally made it click):




And so we had our package. From there, I tried to find interesting ways to incorporate photographic imagery, icons like maps and stars, and of course the colors of the film, while not getting trapped into repeating the style of the covers over and over again. Normally my menus and packaging are a little more regimented; on this I tried to include as much variety as possible. Here's a few favorite menu pages, for example:






And... there you have it. (See this is why I don't like to include menus, etc in these posts... so much more dramatic to just end on an approved cover, don't you think?)

A Correction

I was just looking over that interview I linked to yesterday (because I'm vain, apparently), and realized that I unintentionally dodged one of Rob's questions: he was asking about the bands I claimed to design logos for in high school and I misinterpreted that as a question about the bands I've done posters for recently. So, lest anyone think that I'm trying to hide my sordid musical/design history, the "logos" I was referring to were doodles in my sketchbook for Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc--I remember being particularly happy with a Stone Temple Pilots logo where all the letters connected to each other in complicated ways--and of course my own high school band, Truman's Kitten. (Not to mention it's earlier incarnation, The Two Lips, or spin-off, Stogieman & the Inbreds.) Maybe I'll see if I can't find some of those old flyers or something to post up here, just for giggles...

Good times.

Another interview

....over at Light & Shadow, Boston University's film and culture review blog. In case you don't get enough of me on this blog.

Revanche (DVD)

Hey, look at this: a design process post, on this "design process blog"! What are the odds? *Ahem.*

Anyway, previously, I discussed the process of designing the theatrical poster for this film. The image we chose for the poster was aimed at mass appeal--emphasizing the "genre" elements of the plot (i.e. the gun) to hopefully draw people into the theater... and I think it was a good fit for that.

But when it came time to design the DVD, we wanted to take a step back, think less about why Revanche will be interesting to see tonight at the movies, and more about why this film deserves a place in the collection, what about it is really remarkable. And we decided, ultimately, that it was the subtle things--the gentleness in the tone, the quiet way the film inhabits different spaces--that make it great. One thing that I loved in particular was the way Spielmann will linger on shots of various locations, well before you understand why they might be significant. You almost don't notice it on first viewing, except when the film finally arrives at the moment which gives a particular location its significance, and it has that much more impact.

Practically speaking, the other major advantage we had for the DVD was that I could use frame grabs from the film itself, instead of relying solely on set photography. (We didn't yet have a digitial master when I was working on the poster, and anyway frame grabs don't really have enough resolution to blow up that large.) Don't get me wrong, there was some excellent set photography done for this film, but having the entire film open up to you is a huge advantage.

So, these first two were based on an image from the film that Peter Becker particularly liked... it's a big emotional turning point moment in the film (which I won't spoil for you) that's punctuated by a wind that starts blowing across the previously clam lake. It's a great moment in the film, but it really depended on the movement of the water to make it work, so these... didn't work.



This next was based on a [german, I think?] poster for the film. I rebuilt it from framegrabs since I couldn't find the original files. I like the poster, but I'm glad we didn't use this for the DVD, since it's someone else's design... (Original poster is the 2nd image below.)



This next one I quite liked, because if you've seen the film, you understand immediately the importance of this moment (again, don't want to spoil it for anyone), but even if you haven't, you get a wonderful sense of calm and quiet but yet with an unmistakable sense that something is very very wrong here... a variation of this actually wound up as the booklet cover. (More on that below.)



And finally, the winner: based on the opening shot of the film, this image of "ripples in the water" is a visual metaphor that's certainly been done before... but it, again, takes on a deeper meaning once you've seen that point in the film and know just what is making those ripples, plus it's just a visually beautiful image. Again, very much that sense of quiet. I also quite like the fact that you first view this an image of trees and the reflection of those trees in the water, but in fact both sets of trees are reflections in the water (one before the water ripples, one after), the top one is just flipped upside down. People tend not to notice that at first, but even though you can't put your finger on it, you kind of know that something is off... Anyway, I liked this one a lot, and so did everyone else, so there you have it.



People often ask me to include more than just the covers on here, and I think this is a good opportunity to do that, since the booklet design went through a couple iterations here, too. Here's a look at the first version (I've shrunk it down so you can get a sense of the whole thing--click to enlarge a bit, though still not full size. If you want to read the essay, it's up at the Criterion Current (or you could always just buy the DVD)):



We so seldom get good, high-resolution color photography, I was kind of seduced by it, so I built this design based primarily around nice colors and pretty pictures. And it's fine, I think. But Peter reminded me of some of what I was talking about above--in particular the idea of locations--and I came at the design again with a new perspective, using framegrabs this time:



I think the final booklet was definitely an improvement, and overall I was very happy with this package--an interesting case study in treating the same film in different ways.