More Senso!

I did add just add this to the original post also, but it's worth highlighting on it's own: For those who were interested in the Senso process, F. Ron Miller just posted his half of the story (taking that cover illustration and rippling it out into a fantastic package) on his own blog. Well worth a read!

LK29

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

Senso

Senso was absolutely a group effort: I worked with illustrator Glen Orbik and Criterion Art Director Sarah Habibi worked with designer F. Ron Miller to get to the final result. And I have to say, I'm really really happy with how everything came together! This post will be primarily about the cover, so let me start by sharing the text of the note I first sent to Glen Orbik:

[...] So here’s what we’re thinking: Visconti said that he wanted to show in this film the “melodrama of life”, to show that big operatic melodrama can be powerful and meaningful. So all of the emotions of the film are deliberately heightened and exaggerated, but in a deadly serious way. So we want the cover to have that same feeling of heightened emotion, without straying into tongue-in-cheek self-parody. We thought your style, so influenced by the great mid-century illustrators, would be perfect for this.

We’ve had one fairly specific idea that we think you could execute really well. Taking inspiration from the costuming of the film, with his white uniform with the cape, and her progression of black dresses, I had the idea of something very graphic, where the black and white areas are reduced to simple shapes but all the other details are rendered very painterly and realistically. Something like this kind of thing:



That’s an old Mike Ludlow illustration from (I think) the Saturday Evening Post, but hopefully it makes clear the kind of thing I’m thinking of. So imagine a black background, her in the foreground in her black dress, him behind her in his white uniform, so the shape of him helps to outline the shape of her. This has the added advantage of showing the lovers together but not in a traditional embrace; ideally they’d even be looking away from each other.

The final piece of the puzzle, I think, ought to be the red, quite, and green leaflets dropped on the opera in the very first scene of the film, fluttering in the blackness around them, both to add some splashes of color, and to suggest the political undertones of the film (Italian flag colors, etc). Here’s a very quick and dirty photoshop mock-up of the kind of thing I’m thinking of:



The poses here aren’t ideal--the image of her is actually kind of alright, I think, in the kind of emotion it expresses, but his pose is a bit stilted and nothing special… plus the leaflets obviously look horribly silly in this sketch, but I have faith that they could be striking and beautiful when rendered as part of a painting. But hopefully it reads as proof-of-concept, at least? (And just to be doubly-clear, I’m not suggesting black & white imagery, that was just easier to throw together.)

It’s also worth mentioning that we’ll probably want a decent amount of space at the top (more than in my crappy photoshop sketch, even), for title, director name, etc. Just something to keep in mind.

I should say that this is a lot more specific instruction than I normally like to give to an artist, but the nature of this film just lead us to this idea, and I thought you’d be the man to execute it. If you have any other ideas after watching the film, we’re more than happy to have you sketch those out, as well, but this is the idea that was most exciting to us in the abstract, so we definitely want to see some variation on this sketched out.

(I should take a moment here to credit Sean Phillips with introducing me to the work of Mike Phillips, as seen above. For Sean's own take on a mid-century illustration style, check out Sweet Smell of Success.)

So, working from that incredibly specific brief, Glen sent the following sketches:



Glen also sent along these references for the faces, and a period reference for her pose, to help clarify the sketch.



Glen's new ideas were excellent, too, but at the end of the day the second one was too focused on the bedroom (we wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that this is Dangerous Liaisons or something), and the third made her into a bit too much of an ingenue, when really she's kind of swept up in things, not ultimately in much control at all…

So we were still rolling with the original idea, but we thought her pose wasn't quite right… a bit too heroic. And the wind-swept leaflets were a bit overdramatic, even for this film. So we asked for a revised sketch, and got this (with the understanding that the leaflets would change from sketch to execution):



Closer, but not quite enough of a departure. We asked for another take, and also asked to maybe try the figures higher up in the frame, to accommodate a bottom-of-the-page title treatment. Glen sent the following, with and without the leaflets. Again, reference for her face follows:



We approved the last of those and were off to the races! Glen quickly turned around the final painting, which was absolutely stunning!



…and here's the final, composed cover with type by Ron Miller:



EDITED TO ADD: The story continues over at F. Ron Miller's "Flog."

LK28

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK27

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

LK26

From Liar's Kiss, by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, available for pre-order now.

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!