The Lady Vanishes

Has it really been a full month since I last posted anything here? Wow. Sorry about that. I figure I'd better get something new up here, though, since Peter's just informed me he's going to add a link to this thing on the Criterion blog. So here's some thoughts on a newer Criterion release. (Actually, I don't think this is in stores yet, but the cover's been up on the (newly redesigned) website for awhile so I figure it's fair game.)

The Lady Vanishes is actually one of my favorite films in the Criterion Collection—I saw it for the first time at the Janus Films 50th Anniversary screening last year, and was thoroughly entertained—so I was very happy to have the opportunity to give it the look that I felt it deserved.

In a somewhat unusual situation for me, I had a vague image of the typography in my head before I had any idea what to do with the rest of the cover. A couple of false starts later, I had a treatment I liked (the far right below):



The type has no real justification other than a vague period-appropriateness and my great affinity for Chris Ware (in the 3D shadowing), but it really seems to work for whatever reason. Never underestimate gut instinct in design, I say.

So with the type in place (as far as I was concerned), I turned to the images. Initially, I had the idea that the design for this film should be somehow "tricky." Since the film is very "now you see it, now you don't," I thought there might be something along the lines of a clever optical illusion that might work—something like that image of the two faces staring at each other that's also a picture of a vase? Or maybe a silhouette of a "lady" poking out from behind one of the ascenders of the title treatment, concealed in an obviously impossible way like a cartoon character behind a very small tree?

But I couldn't really think of anything clever that didn't feel too clever, if you know what I mean, so I stepped back a bit. I looked through the available artwork again, and stumbled across this poster:



Which, all things considered, is not anything I'd call a design masterpiece, to say the least. But buried underneath the haphazard film stills is a really pretty fantastic illustration of the train from the film. So, in what some might consider pilfering but I choose to think of as a heroic act of salvage, I pulled the train out of the old poster and combined it with my new type treatment. Like so:



And I have to say, I really like it! The train's just got a perfect style for the film, capturing the vibe of high adventure without being anything too serious. And the colors are gorgeous!

I can't recall if it was producer Curtis Tsui or Art Director Sarah Habibi who had the idea to put the musical notes (representing an important plot point in the film) into the smoke of the train, but that, along with the "vanishing" letters, adds just the right amount of cleverness to tie the whole thing together.

However, there was some concern that maybe the train alone wasn't quite enough, that maybe some more literal connection to the film, and the main character played by Margaret Lockwood specifically, would be needed? We considered hiring an illustrator to try to paint a new figure in the deco-ish style of the train, to be merged together, but that kind of mix and match made me nervous, so, I tried incorporating photos (that new title treatment is taken from another old poster):



...silhouettes (this was just a rough, it would have been significantly redrawn):



...and finally painted images from other posters:



...before eventually settling here:



As you can see, this version was the closest to the original composition, with the added advantage of justifying that trapped space in the upper right corner with the subtle but effective addition of Margaret Lockwood. It's on the verge of turning into a Hollywood "triple-big-head," but I think it narrowly avoids that and is actually pretty successful.

If I do say so myself.

Happy Kirby Day!

It's not a national holiday, but it should be: today would have been Jack Kirby's 90th birthday.

I'd hoped Amazon would cooperate and deliver my Fourth World volume 2 today, but it looks like I'll have to wait a few more days, unfortunately. So I'll have to get today's Kirby fix from Tom Spurgeon's expansive gallery, or that New York Times op-ed from a few days ago.

And for the cinephiles in the crowd, here's an excerpt from Kirby's 2001: A Space Odyssey #2 ("based on concepts from the MGM/Kubrick production"), which I picked up randomly at a flea market in the Adirondacks on our recent vacation. It's Kirby's vision of the dawn of government:

Hands over the City

Hands Over the City was another situation, like Divorce Italian Style, where as soon as I hit "stop" on the VHS screener, I knew what I wanted the cover to be, and I knew who I wanted to do it. First, the what:

After watching the film, I recall being left with the sensation of having watched history unfolding, rather than having watched a narrative. It struck me that this isn't a film about individual people—characters come and go as necessary to move the plot along, but there aren't really "main characters" so much as historical forces that move the plot forward. Certainly, Rod Stieger's Nottola emerges as a primary mover and shaker, but it's not his story, really, it's the story of the city itself. All that boils down to the idea that I didn't want any people on the cover.

I also knew, from our briefing process, that we wanted to find a way to get Rod Steiger on the cover—he's a recognizable face, after all, and this was kind of a lesser-known film. Luckily, there was an easy way around that, since one of the major motifs in the film is Nottola's campaign posters, which allow sort of an end run around my "no people" idea.

The other repeated visual motif in the film is the enormous city planning map in Nottola's office, which is obviously a pretty good way to reference the importance of the city.

Combining those two elements works out to be a pretty simple idea, and easy enough to execute—but also, in the wrong hands, very possibly lifeless and dull. Which was why it was lucky that I simultaneously thought of artist Danijel Zezelj.

A longtime favorite of mine, Danijel's work is incredibly expressive. His work often revolves around architectural elements, textures, stark blacks and whites that evoke iconographic political art, even, occasionally, maps. You couldn't ask for a better candidate for this job.

(By the way, if you're only familiar with Danijel from his American comics work, do yourself a favor and check out the collections of his more personal work—Small Hands might be my favorite, but they're all good.)

So I knew Danijel was perfect for this project, and that was further confirmed when I contacted him and told him about the project, and he told me that he had actually lived in Naples for a while a few years back, and knew it very well. It's always a good sign when you find connections you never knew existed between an illustrator and a project.

I told him what we were looking for, (faithful blog readers might note that on previous art direction posts I've included the original briefs I sent to the illustrators. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the brief I sent to Danijel anymore, but it basically said all that stuff I say above), and here's what he sent back to us, in what are probably the most fully realized "sketches" I've ever seen:



The first one is almost exactly what we were hoping for, with the caveat that we can't really see Rod Steiger's face, which was kind of the whole point of using the poster in the first place. The second was gorgeous, but producer Abbey Lustgarten felt (and I agreed) that the moped was too central on the cover, considering neither of us could recall any mopeds in the film.

So we went back to Danijel and asked him to find the happy medium between the two. He came back with this:



Which was maybe a little too far from what we were liking about the last round—pulling back so far loses some of the immediacy, I think, and losing the "Votta Nottola" type (which Danijel did because he was worried about it conflicting with the title treatment, which is a valid concern) made the political poster idea less obvious at first glance. So I backpedaled a little bit and explained our concerns to Danijel, and he turned in what became the final cover:



I tried a few title treatments, and we settled on the last of these:



Then at the last minute, we decided to move up the launch date of our then-new branding system, so I retrofitted the cover to include that, and we had ourselves a final cover:



On the cover, I needed someone of Danijel's talent to make an otherwise somewhat pedestrian idea sing. But I also worried that I was confining him too much; wasting the opportunity to work with someone of his talent. So, on the interior packaging, I wanted to be sure to give him as much freedom as possible. I asked for cityscapes, broadly, but left it to him to interpret the film as he saw it. And what he turned in for the interiors was better than I could have hoped:



For all the conceptual reasons discussed above, the cover illustration was still the best cover, (and don't get me wrong, I love that cover), but the piece that wound up on the booklet cover (the first above) is one of my absolute favorite pieces of art we've ever commissioned for Criterion. And at the close of the project, Danijel was kind enough to gift it to me, so it now has a place of honor on my wall of art (I'm not sure you can quite make it out in the photo, but seeing the actual paint strokes used to create the final image is really fascinating):



It was a privilege working with Danijel, and the end result is a package I'm incredibly proud of. Thanks again for taking on this project, Danijel!

Wages of Fear

This one was a long road to the final cover—not inappropriate, given the subject matter. Diving right in...

Because this was the second Criterion edition of Wages of Fear, one of the things to keep in mind was that it had to be noticeably different from the original version:



This wasn't really a problem for me, because I never really felt the image on that cover worked—once you've seen the film, it makes perfect sense, but to the uninitiated I think it looks a little too "Creature from the Black Lagoon." (In fact, I remember being surprised upon finally seeing the film that there wasn't any supernatural horror element.) But that scene of Jo in the pool of spilled oil is a powerful one in the film, so I tried a couple new takes on the same theme:



About that type: I found myself very attached to the crazy title treatment from this otherwise bizarre poster:



(Is he punching the truck? Is he punching so hard the sheer force of his blows creates trucks? Kind of a surreal masterpiece, honestly.) Anyway, the title treatment doesn't really have any particular resonance with the film (to me, anyway), but I just loved it's kooky Anders Nilsen vibe. So it informed the above comps and also a few more, once I'd moved away from the pool of oil idea and toward some comps that focused on the perilous trucking suspense:



Or the toll taken on the main characters by their exhausting struggle:



But since, like I say, the type didn't really feel like the film, it wasn't doing the covers as a whole any favors, despite being awesome. Next, I tried taking the type in a very "pulpy" direction, but it came out very "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."



Then there was this one—the type treatment isn't half bad, and it gives a better idea of the plot and the source of suspense than any of the previous comps. The "EXPLOSIVES" type competes with the title a bit, but it's not too bad. A contender:



But here's my favorite of the bunch:



This one I always really dug, both for the "burdens of atlas" vibe—my back gets tired just looking at that image—and the way the title treatment looks like it's giving him a gut punch, adding injury to injury. The problem was that we'd recently done quite a few covers in similar high-contrast "photocopied" styles, and people were starting to get a little sick of that look. (And admittedly, if you're looking for that style, why assign me when you've got Art Chantry and Aesthetic Apparatus in your Rolodex?) So despite liking this one a lot, I had a feeling it was a non-starter. I did another version with a blue overlay, to allay any concerns about too many black & white covers in a row (which, as you can imagine, happens not infrequently at Criterion):



I got pretty enamored of that light blue pretty early on in the process, and I couldn't exactly tell you why—some dark browns to evoke the color of oil would seem the obvious choice, but would possibly have taken things too far in a "sepia-toned" direction. But I've got no real justification for the blue, other than it just felt right—which is enough, I suppose.

So.... where to go from there? I thought I might be able to pull something together using the iconography of the oil company they worked for in the film (visible in some of the earlier comps above), so I adapted that logo. First, I tried building it into an existing still in place of the original logo, but that didn't really work:



Then I tried laying over straight photography, but it never quite clicked:


There's something to that last one, maybe, but still, nothing to write home about. I tried it without any imagery at all, but it wasn't enough:



And this is certainly misguided:



I tried another tack: if that high contrast "atlas" image from before wouldn't fly, maybe I could remake it with straight photography. It didn't quite work the same way, but it had it's own charms, though the title treatment gets a bit lost:



Finally, I came back around to an earlier idea: that photo of the two men, exhausted and fatalistic, really captured something of the mood of the film, so I combined that with the most straightforward and effective of the earlier type treatments, (I lost the "gut punch" but gained a nifty little tucked in director credit), and wound up here, which became the final cover:

Back at work!

Vacation's over (it was fantastic), so it's back to the grind for me. I'll try to have a real blog up here soon, but in the meantime, for the Criterion fans in the audience, we've just posted the first looks at the November Criterion titles which have kept me so busy—of the four November releases, I designed two and art-directed a third.

(One of them is probably my favorite design of mine in a while....)

Anyway. Coming soon: actual content!

Vacation

I'm headed up to the Adirondacks, so I won't be posting anything for at least a week.I'd hoped to get another post up here before I left, but I've been swamped and it was not meant to be. But check back in two weeks and hopefully I'll have something worth the wait ready to post...

An Angel at My Table

An Angel at My Table is a film about writing, more specifically about the writer Janet Frame. It's also about the beautiful New Zealand landscape and a painfully introverted girl learning to experience the world around her. Unfortunately for such a beautiful, colorful film, we had almost no color photography from the film. Apparently they hadn't really taken any color photographs on set (or if they had, we couldn't find them), so the closest we had were some crudely colorized black and white stills. Since one thing we really hate to do at Criterion is represent a color film with black and white art (unless there's a good reason for it), I was limited in my options.

One of the ideas I had kicking around in my head seemed at first like a good solution—I had this notion of Janet Frame constructing a world around herself via her writing, so I thought using an obviously "fake" style to recreate "real" scenes from the film could be an interesting way to turn a limitation into a strength. If I'm not mixing up my chronologies here, I seem to recall the cool layered effect of the Shins' Chutes Too Narrow cover being an inspiration in this direction. Here's my first attempt:



This composition is meant to evoke the moment in the film when Janet returns to New Zealand after some time abroad, and the super-saturated color goes a long way toward capturing that vibe, in my opinion. I also liked the way flattening the colors emphasized the iconic quality of her bright orange sphere of hair. And I thought the rolling hills were kind of a nice effect.

I also liked the idea of incorporating some of Janet's writing, especially in manuscript form. The text on the following comps is the last page of the last volume of her autobiography, The Envoy from Mirror City, (I'm pretty sure), recreated from the final scene of the film which shows her typing it, complete with the corrections and typos shown in the film:



Ultimately, it was decided that the whole "created world" metaphor just didn't hold water. I suppose I can see the argument—that these are somehow about Janet Frame but not really about Jane Campion's film about Janet Frame, if that makes sense—but I do still like them.

Alas, it was not to be. The first one was completely unreproduceable, but I tried to rebuild the second more organically from framegrabs and such, but that only highlighted the "Lifetime Movie of the Week" elements that were already lurking in there to begin with:



I had the idea that if I could find wallpaper and siding to match that shown in Janet's childhood home, I could shoot a new photograph to make this next composition work, but I never found anything remotely close. The wood and wallpaper in this comp aren't even close. There's something pleasing about the configuration, but this sloppy stock image conflagration was all I was ever able to cobble together, so nothing came of it.



I then tried a couple variations on the earlier idea using high-def framegrabs. Now, to get any image quality out of high-def framegrabs, you can't really run them much larger than half a page. Since I was trying for a feeling of openness, I didn't really want to divide up the cover with arbitrary divisions, so I tried a couple comps where I felt I could fake the upper half of the image:



The first one also takes the "writing" concept from previous comps and turns it into something a little more abstract—the idea of writing, rather than an actual sample of her writing. This solved the problem of making it recognizably a "cover" (as opposed to an editorial spread), but maybe removed an interesting layer of meaning.

I then tried a whole new tack, taking my inspiration from the scene in the film when Janet, on the train to her new school, tries out in her notebook many different possible signatures, constructing a new identity for herself. I tried to reproduce her shaky handwriting to the best of my ability.



That was a serious contender for a while, actually, and eventually got used as the cover to the insert booklet. But finally, we fell back on the image that had often been used to promote the film in the past, which I had been reluctant to use because I didn't like the way the image had been colorized. But it's a great image, and it represents the film well, so after a little tweaking of the color, I got comfortable with it, and we had ourselves an approved cover: