Close-Up

So… Close-Up. This one really surprised me when I watched it; great, but not at all what I was expecting. I thought it was going to be a real challenge to design a cover for, since it's very much a film of ideas more than visuals, but as it turned out we hit on a great basic concept in the briefs meeting, and the rest pretty much just came down to execution.

The basic idea, of zooming in super-close on a printed image to reveal the process dots that make up the printed image, might seem a bit on-the-nose for a film titled "Close-Up," but is actually kind of perfect: Kiaristami's whole methodology in the film is to lay bare the structure of filmmaking, it's both the main mover of the plot and the theme behind the whole thing. But then, of course, he's playing with you, too, you're never entirely sure what's real and what isn't, what's "re-enactment" and what's documentary, and even some of the things that seem to be very real--the final scene, for example, where the audio cuts in and out--are actually very deliberate choices to draw attention to the constructs of filmmaking.

Similarly, the 4-color process dots in the cover here draw your attention to the actual process of printing, but of course are actually an affectation… there's no press in the world that would use dots that big. (That's one reason why the cover was made totally digitally… we could have actually printed something out very small, then scanned that in and blown it up, but I liked the artificiality in this case, I thought it worked toward the theme.)

So anyway, with that idea in mind I put together the following comps. The very first one I did is the clearest execution of the concept, taking an image from the lovely scene at the end of the film--the greens and pinks really hold the whole thing together, (and it didn't hurt that this seemed like a good moment to use green in the design for an Iranian film):



I was pretty convinced that was the way to go, but I did a few more variations on the theme just to give people some options to chose from. This first one below is kind of interesting, but kind of blows the 4-color process concept by printing all 4 colors at the same angle (i.e. directly on top of each other). It's a neat look, though, I should just it for something else sometime… (I recommend clicking to embiggen.)





The rest are just variations on the theme, not terrible but not as nice as the first one. So that's where we wound up!