Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Charade Blu-ray

I'll offer these without too much commentary, since there's not a lot of high-concept thinking behind them: we wanted to take the original Charade cover and update it slightly for the Blu-ray release. Ultimately, we basically just went back to something a little closer to the original poster, with the title treatment taken directly from the film itself, but as you can see there were a few detours along the way. Here's the original DVD cover (not by me), and a few of the various original posters on which it was based. I'm actually not sure which of these was the original, or who did them, but they're obviously all very indebted to the great main title work by Maurice Binder. (NOT Saul Bass as I've seen a few people inaccurately suggest. Bass was also great, of course, but Binder, who gave the world most of the classic Bond opening titles, among others, was no slouch himself!)






And here's my tweaks... interesting how subtle things (like changing the angle slightly from the DVD version) make a big difference, right?









Some at the office wanted to go for more of a departure, something like those last few above, but in the end I think we made the right choice. Those other covers might have been the right choice for a whole new edition, but this release is all the same content as the DVD, just in a new format, so it just made sense to keep the same basic look as the basically successful original DVD, just slightly tweaked to fix a few things that had started to grate on us over the years. Getting a little closer to the original poster gave me some confidence that we'd have something which had already stood the test of time. Here's the final cover:

2 comments:

Daniel Zalkus said...

Cool cover. I love that film.

Ryan MCFC said...

Hey Eric, have you seen this flickr feed yet? Pretty incredible find in old London tube station.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@N00/4695638706/in/set-72157624079183751/

When I saw the Alec Guinnness poster my first reaction was "That would make a perfect Criterion cover if they release that movie!" Well, it turns out Criterion already did release this movie and you guys did use this image. :)