sam's myth

CINEMA SOUND 2011

2012-01-13T11:26:00.001-08:00

In my spare time I enjoy keeping up with and listening to new and old film scores, and I've been posting some favorites and some mixes over at Cinema Sound, culminating in a two-part mix of 2011 film music. Part One is mostly ambient/electronic, to be enjoyed at night on a drive or while working or relaxing. Part Two is mostly orchestral in nature. Both are continuous mixes lasting about an hour each. If you're a Tumblr user, follow Cinema Sound for more updates and a monthly mix/podcast.

ELENA

2012-01-03T22:13:00.000-08:00

Here's my theatrical poster for ELENA, coming this year from Zeitgeist Films. From Andrey Zyvagintsev, the Russian director of THE RETURN, ELENA won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard and is a fantastic and beautiful thriller. Coming atcha at Sundance, and you can watch the trailer here.

Thanks to Zeitgeist Films for asking me to work on this project, and stay tuned for news on a limited edition screenprint version of this, coming soon.

2011 IN FILM

2012-01-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

My 10 favorite movies of 2011 as of now. Still haven’t seen: SHAME, A DANGEROUS METHOD, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, MYSTERIES OF LISBON, HOUSE OF PLEASURES, THE TURIN HORSE, THE TRIP, WINNIE THE POOH, LE HAVRE.

1. THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick)

2. HANNA (Joe Wright)

3. SENNA (Asif Kapadia)

4. BEGINNERS (Mike Mills)

5. LE QUATTRO VOLTE (Michelangelo Frammartino)

6. MEEK’S CUTOFF (Kelly Reichardt)

7. MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (Sean Durkin)

8. MELANCHOLIA (Lars Von Trier)

9. CERTIFIED COPY (Abbas Kiarostami)

10. ATTACK THE BLOCK (Joe Cornish)

Honorable mention: THE INTERRUPTERS, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, THE FUTURE, THE SKIN I LIVE IN, DRIVE, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, WEEKEND, POETRY, BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

HOLIDAY PRINT SALE!

2011-11-27T13:56:00.000-08:00

These remaining prints from my inventory will be on sale at special prices for two weeks until December 14th, when they will ship out to arrive before the holidays (*guaranteed only in the US). Up for grabs: Mario World piece for Gallery 1988, Trash Humpers & Man With a Movie Camera prints for the Belcourt, Jeff the Brotherhood Soundland print, Sebastian Speaks gig poster and Owl Spirit art print, all 18x24".

All orders placed in these two weeks will receive one of these bonus mini-prints in their tube, pictured below. These will be randomly inserted, but if you have a special request I can try to assign first-come-first-serve. Please note these are extra mini-print proofs from my Belcourt show, some of which have slight imperfections which is why I'm giving what's left away. Mini-prints may include Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, My Neighbor Totoro, Never Let Me Go, Carlos and one of two Nashville Film Festival poster designs.

Head to my shop if you'd like to place an order. Thanks for your support in 2011 and happy holidays!

MARIO WORLD PRINTS

2011-11-15T12:12:00.000-08:00

After a run at Gallery 1988's Old-School Video Game Show, my "Mario World" screenprints are now available here in my shop at a special price. These 18x24" four-color screenprints were beautifully printed by my friends at Burlesque of North America and could make a great gift for the Super Mario fan in your family, young or old!

CRITERION + WOAW

2011-11-15T11:03:00.000-08:00

WORLD ON A WIRE, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's two-part sci-fi film made for German television in 1973, will make its way to your HD television in 2012 courtesy of The Criterion Collection. Here's the cover I prepared based on my theatrical poster design, with package and menu designs to follow...

TRISTEN DECKS THE HALLS

2011-11-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

Help Tristen release her “Decks the Halls” Christmas 7” by contributing to this kickstarter campaign. I played some drums and am working on the single and poster design, which I'll post soon. Pledge a little for the single, or more for additional gift goodies, like Tristen’s handmade journals and scarves. A great early present for anyone wanting to support local artists this holiday season.

OUT NOW: KURONEKO

2011-10-17T07:24:00.001-07:00

Kaneto Shindo's masterful erotic ghost-story KURONEKO (Black Cat) is out today on Criterion DVD and Blu-ray. A must-see for lovers of Japanese cinema and the fantastic, it has become a personal favorite of mine through my work with Janus Films and Criterion on the film's new theatrical release and DVD package. I wrote previously about the process behind designing the poster; For the DVD/BD cover Criterion wanted to not stray too far from that, and after noticing the almost -disappearing quality of certain metallic inks when working on THE MUSIC ROOM, Eric Skillman put together this composition in which the ghost mother character would hover alone in the woods, then vanish when looked at from another angle. I loved the concept and was excited to take advantage of the print medium by doing something interesting and different like this. Here are a couple of shots of the cover--although the effect is hard to capture with a camera-- followed by some images of my booklet layout and menu designs. I couldn't be a bigger fan of this beautiful film, and I'm excited for others to discover it. Thanks to Eric Skillman, Sarah Habibi, and the Janus and Criterion staff for a job well done.

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK

2011-10-14T07:48:00.001-07:00

Here's a new theatrical poster I made for Kino for CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: THE LOOK. Subtitled as "a self-portrait through others," it's a lovely kind of documentary -portrait with Rampling, one of the finest and most beautiful English actresses, talking with other artists and friends about creativity, art, performance, film, and life. Read more about the film in this Guardian piece and check playdates here.

JOY

2011-10-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked to come up with some album artwork for Souvenir Driver, the band/alias of my good friend Nate Wey. I'm always excited to work on projects with Nate, who you may remember from a previous blog post on his great photography. Learn more and get the JOY LP here.

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA PRINT

2011-10-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

New screenprint for The Belcourt Theatre celebrating this Sunday night's one-screening-only pairing of Dziga Vertov's 1929 masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA with a live score performed by The Alloy Orchestra. This is a 3-color 18x24" signed & numbered edition of 50 prints produced locally at Kangaroo Press on textured brown craft paper stock. Get yours Sunday at the Belcourt, or if you can't make it, I've put a stack for sale in my shop.

The prints turned out great.. above is a quick shot of a print, below are some detail shots and for an even closer look, the original design in black white and grey (click to enlarge).

LAST CHANCE PRINTS

2011-09-30T15:54:00.001-07:00

Just a few STALKER and JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD screenprints left... get em here before they're going going gone...

CARLOS ON CRITERION

2011-09-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

Olivier Assayas' CARLOS is out on Criterion DVD and Blu-ray today. I did the cover and package design on this one, and can't wait to dig into the extras myself.

JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD print

2011-09-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we're printing this poster for one of my favorite bands, JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD, live at Soundland at the Neuhoff Factory in Nashville. Come by the Neuhoff Factory for a day of great bands (Tristen is also on the bill) and to check out some posters. A few poster artists including myself will be set up there and I'll have a few things for sale. If there are any extras of these leftover I'll put them up in my shop. Later Saturday night, I'll be performing Nirvana's Nevermind with My So-Called Band for the official afterparty at Mercy Lounge. Should be a fun day!

UPDATE: Not everyone made their way into the poster room yesterday (or even know it was there?) and we ended up with a few extra prints that you can get here through my store. Limited signed & numbered edition of 50, 2-color 18x24" screenprints hand-pulled by Drew and Bingham of Grand Palace live at the show. It was awesome designing this poster for one of my very favorite bands. Get em while they last. Here are a few shots from yesterday...

STALKER print

2011-09-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

This 18x24" screenprint will be for sale at the Belcourt Theatre next Saturday, September 24th in honor of Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER showing that weekend. For anyone who can't make it to this rare screening in Nashville, a limited number of additional prints are available through my shop. Ryan Nole at Kangaroo Press will be making this look extra pretty on black stock in a signed and numbered limited edition of 50.

MARIO WORLD print

2011-09-18T06:28:00.000-07:00

My "Mario World" print for Gallery1988's Old School Video Game Show is now available at their site. Also available for the serious collector is a custom birch-framed print numbered 1/75. These four-color screenprints were printed by the fine folks at Burlesque of North America. If you're in the Venice area, check out the show for a lot of great NES-inspired pieces!

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-09-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

This post concludes a week-long celebration of the illustrated work of 100% ORANGE. From Monday: 100% ORANGE + Louis Malle. From Tuesday: 100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE Part 1. From Wednesday: 100% ORANGE + Yonda? From Wednesday: 100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE Part 2. For two beautifully-laid out compendiums of 100% ORANGE illustration, each art objects in their own right, find a copy of these two titles: ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE and the "100% ORANGE A to Z" issue of Pooka magazine:

100% ORANGE + AMELIE

2011-09-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

For today's penultimate post on the wonderful illustrated work of 100% Orange, I've been saving these few images of the Japanese AMELIE novelization which they illustrated. I can't wait to actually get my hands on a copy of this.

Sam's Myth presents a week-long celebration of the illustrated work of 100% ORANGE. From Monday: 100% ORANGE + Louis Malle. From Tuesday: 100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE Part 1. From Wednesday: 100% ORANGE + Yonda? From Wednesday: 100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE Part 2. For two beautifully-laid out compendiums of 100% ORANGE illustration, each art objects in their own right, find a copy of these two titles: ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE and the "100% ORANGE A to Z" issue of Pooka magazine:

100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE Pt 2

2011-09-08T09:24:00.001-07:00

Here are some more of my favorite pieces by 100% ORANGE. Images are from the book 100% ORANGE ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE, a beautifully-laid-out collection that is a must for any illustration-lover's shelf. You can pick up a copy here or at most cool stores in Japan. See the first part of this post from Tuesday here.

Sam's Myth presents a week-long celebration of the illustrated work of 100% ORANGE. From Monday: 100% ORANGE + Louis Malle. From Tuesday: 100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE Part 1. From Wednesday: 100% ORANGE + Yonda? For two beautifully-laid out compendiums of 100% ORANGE illustration, each art objects in their own right, find a copy of these two titles: ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE and the "100% ORANGE A to Z" issue of Pooka magazine:

100% ORANGE + YONDA

2011-09-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

Yonda? It means: Did you read? This play-on-words panda character by 100% Orange was created to promote Shincho-Bunko (bunko are small Japanese paperbacks, and Shincho is one of the largest and oldest publishing companies). You can see bright yellow posters and ads like the one above each summer in bookstores across Japan. Below are a few delightful Yonda comic strips, plus a few covers of Yom Yom, a literary magazine. By collecting coupons inside the paperbacks, young readers can order special books, toys and goods from the Yonda Club that aren't for sale anywhere else. Another wonderful branding job from 100% ORANGE.

You can also download some Yom Yom desktop wallpapers here. Bookstore image via Nekousa.

Sam's Myth presents a week-long celebration of the illustrated work of 100% ORANGE. From Monday: 100% ORANGE + Louis Malle. From Tuesday: 100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE Part 1. For two beautifully-laid out compendiums of 100% ORANGE illustration, each art objects in their own right, find a copy of these two titles: ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE and the "100% ORANGE A to Z" issue of Pooka magazine:

100% ORANGE - GOOD SMILE PT. 1

2011-09-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Here are some of my favorite pieces by 100% ORANGE. These images-- posters, book covers and assorted illustrations-- are from the book 100% ORANGE ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE, a beautifully-laid-out collection that is a must for any illustration-lover's shelf. Stay tuned for a second part on Thursday.

Sam's Myth presents a week-long celebration of the illustrated work of 100% ORANGE. From Monday: 100% ORANGE + Louis Malle. For two beautifully-laid out compendiums of 100% ORANGE illustration, each art objects in their own right, find a copy of these two titles: ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE and the "100% ORANGE A to Z" issue of Pooka magazine:

100% ORANGE + LOUIS MALLE

2011-09-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

A few months before discovering one of my new favorite movies, ZAZIE DANS LE METRO, I received a gift from my Japanese friend Yasushi: a set of four DVDs he had helped produce for IMAGICA in Japan; their The Louis Malle Collection, with cover and package illustrations by 100% ORANGE. Beloved in Japan, 100% ORANGE has produced countless iconic illustrated works, books and posters, and all week long I'll be sharing their work on this blog. First, enjoy this example of DVD-package-design perfection.

Famous for their illustrations of children, the Japanese illustration powerhouse known as 100% ORANGE was a perfect match for the films of Louis Malle, which often explore themes and stories of childhood (above: their cover for AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS). Yasushi tells me the initial idea was to commission Mr. Kenji Oikawa, the man behind the 100% ORANGE moniker, to illustrate the ZAZIE cover alone; it was art director Kasumi Takemoto who insisted that all four Malle covers should get the ORANGE treatment. Designer Kiyoshi Tsukamoto beautifully tied the packages together, which all feature custom liner notes, reversible covers, and best of all, fold-out posters of each cover inside each title (I am getting my ZAZIE poster framed as I type this). Having worked on DVD packages myself, I can say that package design doesn't get much nicer than this. On the back of the ZAZIE poster, for example, is a beautifully laid-out "ZAZIE A to Z" index written by author and critic Mikado Koyanagi. The first entry, for AMELIE, interestingly points out that though Zazie herself could pass in your imagination as a child-version of Audrey Tautou's heroine of Montmartre, director Jeunet had never seen Malle's film completely. More on AMELIE and 100% ORANGE later this week...

Need icing on the cake? How about the custom-cut stickers on each DVD cover, each featuring a miniature thumbnail of the film's original poster? Or, you can look for these illustrations on companion t-shirts in Tokyo shop windows. A suberb branding for this series, and a perfect match of filmmaker and illustrator.

Thanks to Yashishi and Kasumi for these translations and for allowing me to share these images with US readers. Here are the other covers, for Malle's ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS and MILOU IN MAY (MAY FOOLS).

This begins a week-long celebration of the illustrated work of 100% ORANGE. Stay tuned for more posts each day this week. For two beautifully-laid out compendiums of 100% ORANGE illustration, each art objects in their own right, find a copy of these two titles: ILLUSTRATION WORK: GOOD SMILE and the "100% ORANGE A to Z" issue of Pooka magazine:

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-09-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

High Noon, Czech poster by Bretislav Sebek, 1962. Available at Posteritati.

LAST CHANCE: TIM & ERIC PRINTS

2011-09-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all, I only have a handful of Tim & Eric prints left from last year's show in Nashville. These are 18x24" screenprints hand-pulled at Boss Construction, signed artist proofs (unnumbered) and each one is a little different as seen in the picture above. Get 'em here or click the Store button at the top of the page. Aboolseye.

GRAPHIS ANNUAL: THE ESSENTIAL 52/86

2011-08-29T09:40:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, you know that all you need for limitless design inspiration can be found in any Graphis Annuals ranging from the early 50's to the early 80's. You have obsessively sought out copies of any of these annuals, maybe collecting even whole decades and periods, and spent an embarassing amount of money in the process. If you're smarter than me, you've waited for the release of this book, which collects highlights from these annuals' greatest years and presents them in their original page layouts (like the originals, some designs are in color and some in black-and-white), for one good price. A great gift for young and old design lovers, an amazing reference and resource, this has gotta be one of the essential design books available, a must have. Here's where you can get one.

CHILDRENS BOOKSHELF: Wacky Pohadke

2011-08-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to have sent a guest post over to my favorite art site on the net, 50 Watts, highlighting one of my favorite recent book finds. I found this at Cedok, an adorable book and zakka shop hidden around Akihabara in Tokyo (I had to ask a few locals before I found the entryway leading up to the 2nd floor location). On all levels, it's one of the most amazing and beautiful shops I've ever visited in my life. The kind Japanese owner and his wife were quite surprised to see a young white guy with a backpack coming in looking specifically for vintage and strange Czech childrens books. Thankfully this was their specialty, and we got on splendidly. His first recommendation from his incredible collection was this title, Prastene Pohadke illustrated by Bohumil Stepan (translates to something like Wacky Fairy Tales), and that if I were to only buy one book it should be this one (I bought many, and even got an extra thrown in after putting the owner on the list for my show in Tokyo... gotta love a good barter). To see more Wacky Pohadke visit Will Schofield's 50 Watts.

On this night I ran to find an ATM six blocks away before the shop closed, then wore out my feet and body in Akihabara's vast electronic and toy mecca until it all shut down, with treasures from Cedok on my back. Below, Cedok's card , some pictures from inside the shop, and the cover of the owner's impressive and beautifully designed book on the history of Czech illustrators, bookshops and popular childrens characters. Thank you so much to the owners of Cedok for sharing these treasures with us. Visit them if you can, and in the meantime follow Cedok on Twitter and visit their official Japanese sites for books and zakka.

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-08-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

I wish all Hollywood movies sounded as tantalizing as DRIVE, an upcoming movie directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, and described by some who have seen it as an "art house action movie..." Easy to please, I love this poster for three reasons: its focus on man-crush hall-of-famer Ryan Gosling, plus the combined white border and the retro pop splash of the pink scripted title treatment.

MARIA HOLMER DAHLGREN + IKEA

2011-08-26T09:02:00.001-07:00

As a lover of design and all things visual, I am constantly bookmarking images I love, buying book covers to collect, looking at posters online, but rarely does something I see stop me in my tracks completely as did these postcards by Swedish designer Maria Holmer Dahlgren. Images so perfectly composed, colored and realized that you wish you had made them, so miniature and perfect that you wish you could enlarge and frame them on your wall, so imaginative that you feel like you're traveling through Sweden in your daydreams. These designs are simply perfect to me, everything I could hope for in a collectible Swedish postcard set. Now they are just one more reason to visit your regional IKEA, besides the Expedit shelves, elderberry syrup and cinnamon rolls. Here are the five designs commissioned for their postcard pack, and here's where you can read more about Maria, which is what I'm about to do myself, before planning which of these places to visit first:

More here and at Grain Edit.

Children's Bookshelf: SHIGERU MIWA

2011-08-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

For the first in a number of posts sharing some of the strange and pretty books I picked up on my travels this year, I have chosen one of my favorites: Only One Me, a beautiful and surreal children's book written by poet Shuntaro Tanikawa and illustrated by Shigeru Miwa, published by Balloon-sha. I can't find much info about the creator of these great illustrations, but the inside flap of the book teases with thumbnails of three other tantalizing titles by Miwa: It's really like this--, Why don't they ever ask me, and Grandma-- another duo-tone picture which according to Steven Heller's Design Literacy explores a child's emotions observing Alzheimer's disease, a more taboo and personal topic for Japanese children's books. Below I'm posting some extremely crude shots of some of my favorite pages of Only One Me, which you may click to enlarge.

UPDATED: My friend Yasushi has just schooled me on Shuntaro Tanikawa, informing me that not only is he, now over 70 years old, one of the most well-known Japanese poets, but he also wrote both the original "Astro Boy" theme lyrics and co-wrote the screenplay for Kon Ichikawa's film "Tokyo Olympiad." In addition to publishing plentiful books of poetry and children's books he also translated "Peanuts" into Japanese. Wow. Thanks Yasushi!

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-08-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

Here's one of my favorite posters from 1998, a time when I was really falling in love with film, and Alfonso Cuaron's beautiful adaptation of GREAT EXPECTATIONS became (and still remains) an underrated favorite of mine. This teaser poster, which I still remember seeing in the Lion's Head theater lobby, stars not young star Gwyneth Paltrow, but Francesco Clemente's beautiful painted portrait of her, one of over 200 pieces that Clemente painted for the film as stand-ins for the artwork of Ethan Hawke's Finn. As a teaser, it foreshadows Cuaron's lush color palette, all overgrown greens and golden hair. I loved the studio's decision to market this Christmas release with this painting alone. See more of Clemente's work as it is integrated perfectly into the film and its credits sequences, and more of his work here.

LITTLE THINGS

2011-08-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

on my Tumblr.

BOOKS!

2011-08-19T15:22:00.001-07:00

New book finds from Japan, here and there, to photograph soon and share...

MARIO WORLD

2011-08-13T07:51:00.001-07:00

I made this piece for Gallery 1988's upcoming video-game themed art show paying tribute to the greatest Nintendo classics. It's my tribute to the original Super Mario Brothers game, the Mushroom Kingdom, and everything that came after that on our consoles and in our imaginations. Click the image to enlarge it and see some of the details; there are some hidden things here and there that Mario experts will be able to spot. This will soon become an 18x24" screenprint courtesy of the wizards at Burlesque of North America, the design and print company of my old Nashville friend (and one of my favorite artists) Mike Davis. Prints will be available at the show in late September and through Gallery1988, and a limited amount may be available here through my site. Stay tuned for more info!

Process: WORLD ON A WIRE

2011-08-03T15:59:00.001-07:00

As Fassbinder's newly-rediscovered sci-fi opus WORLD ON A WIRE makes its rounds in US theaters, I thought I'd share a few steps in the poster design process. I was honored to have Janus Films ask me to work on this exciting project, and it ended up being a tricky journey from complexity to minimalism. After watching the 2-part film, the first step was obvious: convert the iconic original title treatment into English. After incorrectly assuming that the typeface was a form of Helvetica, a little detective work identified it as an out-of-print version of Akzidenz Grotesk, the typeface that branded the famous and iconic Marber Penguin covers. I knew off the bat that these white lines could be a great graphic starting point for my design.

I felt that we should present WORLD ON A WIRE as a kind of event movie for its target audience: lovers of international cinema, science-fiction and the avant garde. For some reason at the time-- likely my infatuation with the complex, detail-filled Mondo screenprints designed by the likes of Tyler Stout and Ken Taylor-- my initial instinct was to create something epic in scope and volume, filled with sci-fi imagery and digital abstractions, with a retro 70's frame. This resulted in the rough comp below:

Meanwhile, I came up with this idea for a teaser poster that could trumpet the arrival of the film as an event...

...and, in the interest of additional options, this quad-style teaser poster that typographically suggested the film's worlds-within-worlds theme:

Janus liked my use of the white lines of the title treatment as a both a graphic element and a suggestion of the film's multiple layers of reality, but after sitting on it for a while we started to think it was too complex, too cold. I felt I just went overboard... I didn't like it. I sent them this next idea, switching the main color field to the red background of the film's credits, and simplifying the concept to something more graphic and minimal. The hero's face would be broken up and delayed through the white lines as his identity in the film is fractured through multiple realities:

(The below image, which I made based on a shot of a computer panel in the film, was integrated as a background pattern for many of these comps... The dials and panels could, I thought, help remind viewers of the sci-fi genre):

A couple other variations on the same concept:

And a no-good, too-abstract pattern-only variation...

Janus loved these color schemes, but we still felt like we hadn't nailed it. We wondered if we even needed the hero's face at all... if we could convey the concept of alternate worlds and multiple realities with an even simpler iconic image. They pointed to my posters for Before Sunrise and Before Sunset as examples, and I was happy to indulge in such a liberating guideline. Kind of the opposite of a studio telling you that they want all the actors' heads big and large across the poster, this is the kind of direction from their client that a designer dreams of. I started with this simple overlay of two circles, a vertical representation of multiple realities:

...and the rest presented itself almost instantaneously. The overlapping shape would become a watchful eye, a sinister symbol of control; within the target of that eye we would see our hero running for his life, and from that eye would hang the puppet strings holding the title, suggesting an invisible manipulating force. The lines from the title treatment could continue upwards and suggest a modern cityscape. I went back to black for the dominant background color and had fun coloring the rest in a way that resembled the look of the film, but with a little more vibrancy and play.

I was really happy with the result and Janus approved it without any further suggestions. Of everything I've done, this piece was probably most inspired by my dad's artwork, which he would often execute by hand with skillful airbrushing techniques. I'm very proud of this one, but the coolest thing about it is that a studio like Janus was willing and happy to take a purely graphic approach to a theatrical poster for an important release. We hope it seduces viewers into Fassbinder's newly-rediscovered world(s)...

Poster for sale in the Criterion shop.

Janus Films presents WORLD ON A WIRE
Art direction: Sarah Habibi
Trailer (long version) edited by Damon Packard

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-07-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

Jerusalem tourism poster by Eliezer Weishoff, 1966. Via Graphic Nothing.

CRITERION PRESENTS KURONEKO

2011-07-18T12:35:00.000-07:00

Kaneto Shindo's haunting, erotic ghost story KURONEKO is making its way to the Criterion Collection this October. I worked on this cover with Eric Skillman, who came up with this concept as an adaptation of my original theatrical poster. The gang is planning something neat for the printing of this cover and I'll be excited to see it in person. More images from the rest of the package and menus to come. KURONEKO has been one of my favorite film discoveries in recent years... I adore it and I'm excited for others to discover it too. Take a look:

ON TOUR / TEASER

2011-07-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of recent updates, as another quick tour has snuck up on me and I write from Denver, CO... New art coming soon; until then, enjoy this teaser for a screenprint I'm working on now and have been waiting all my life to make...

SEBASTIAN HOOTS

2011-06-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

Now available in my store is a new screenprinted gig poster I made for my friend William Tyler and his label Sebastian Speaks as well as a text-free art print version. The 18x20" gig poster is a 2-color print in an edition of 40, some of which will be available at the show and a small number of which you can get in my store; the 16x20" "Owl Spirit" art print is an edition of 20. Nashvillians should be sure to catch what promises to be a fantastic show at an interesting venue, featuring a rare performance from KORT as well as William's own Tyler Family Band. Here are a couple of detail shots from our night of printing at Boss Construction:

CRITERION PRESENTS CARLOS

2011-06-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

Olivier Assayas' CARLOS continues its epic journey arriving on DVD and Blu-ray this September from The Criterion Collection. Here is the new cover I designed based on my original theatrical poster for IFCFilms. Check out the other forthcoming Criterion releases here.

WORLD ON A WIRE

2011-05-27T08:11:00.000-07:00

I'm proud to share this new poster I made I made for Janus Films for Fassbinder's sci-fi epic WORLD ON A WIRE. A mind-bending paranoia thriller whose source novel has been considered one of the first to imagine virtual reality, you can think of it as Germany's modern sci-fi masterpiece just as ALPHAVILLE is to France and SOLARIS is to Russia. Head over to Adrian Curry's Movie Poster of the Week column at MUBI for more details and a too-kind write-up, and be on the lookout for this new restoration touring the country starting this summer.

UPDATE: The poster can now be purchased at the Criterion store.

Process: SOLARIS

2011-05-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

SOLARIS is being released today by The Criterion Collection in a new transfer on Blu-ray and DVD. I was honored to be asked to work on a new cover and package design for it; a dream-come-true assignment. Criterion didn't give me any major restrictions in re-visualizing Tarkovsky's science-fiction masterpiece, but an existing cover had grown stale and they wanted something fresh for the film's birth on Blu-ray. We looked at the fantastic Polish poster designed by Andrzej Bertrandt and loved its abstract futuristic imagery and its title treatment. But I also felt that this poster, and many others that had been made for the film, all but ignored the humanity and psychology of the film as it relates to its protagonist Kris and his lost wife Hari who lives in his memory and, it appears, on the space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris. This is the core of Tarkovsky's film, and what separates it from so many other classic science fiction films, and we wanted to focus on this while remaining open to other visual possibilities. And I loved the idea of making Hari, rather than Kris (the protagonist), the icon for the re-design.

The first step in the design process is always to watch or re-watch the film. Solaris is a film I had already spent a good amount of time with, a film that has only grown more interesting each time I've seen it. Watching it again from a design perspective, I took notes on themes, concepts and imagery that I wanted to focus on and frame grabs that I might want to use, and also revisited some of his other films, interviews and commentaries just to sink myself into the world of Tarkovsky. My instinct was to start with a few key visual ideas and explore from there: Hari (a haunting shot from her entrance into the film seemed like it would work as a striking icon), an ocean background (nature is an important character in Solaris and I wanted to focus on this), a circular motif suggesting both the planet and a psychological hole/portal, and a hand-written title treatment representing the film's humanity over the cold, clean aesthetic associated with most science-fiction films. Many variations followed:

While we let those ideas sink in, I continued to run with some other rough ideas and experiments, throwing everything to the wall and seeing what stuck. With a film as visually rich as this, it was easy to be inspired and play, and I knew that it was going to take a lot of exploration to arrive at the perfect cover.

These below incorporate a photograph I had taken of a wet and rusty metal dish at my dad's house in the country; I thought it would make for a great planet icon. These were a bit thin conceptually, not really tapping into the humanity I wanted to convey, but I'm fond of them from a purely graphic standpoint.

Above, another purely graphic approach using the rusted dish. Inspired constantly by the great Czech and Polish poster artists, I always like trying messy, abstract concepts that don't use any film imagery at all, just to see if they might work, to see how abstract a cover we could possibly get away with. But for a film photographed this beautifully, it was a hard thought to forgo any actual images from the film in the design; some kind of photo montage was feeling like the best possible tribute we could pay to the beauty of the film. Next came a few more experiments trying a Futura title treatment and a Kris-centric cover:

With all of these covers thrown about the virtual table, the image that Criterion wanted me to come back to and work with was of the ghostly Hari, and they liked this comp in which I flipped an image from the film upside down, switching the assumed roles of the pictured reflection in the water and the actual photographed embankment. Reflection being such a huge theme in the film, this made sense to me as a visual trick and I liked the haunting quality of the reflected trees fading up and melting away into the space above:

Meanwhile, with a cover moving in this direction we thought a more genre-specific title treatment might make sense. I made an original title treatment that would serve as a kind of rebranded logo. I also thought it would also look nice reflected under itself, on top of whatever background we had to work with. I threw together a few simple cover concepts to try the new title treatment, including a simple-as-it-gets "planet in outer space" concept that checked-in with those original Polish posters. These also demonstrate a fixation I was enjoying with a contrast between a black-and-white background (representing Earth/nature) and a circular planet/gateway filled with color.

Switching back to the "reflection" comp... the colors in this framegrab came across as too dull and murky, and with the dark shadow of Hari this was starting to look like just a dreary ghost story. It was suggested that I try to incorporate some of the planet's vivid colors that we see in the film's later sequences, which led me to a comp that would be closer to our final cover but still not right, looking a bit hellish:

I went to another film still that would provide some nice reflected imagery and came up with this comp that I still like, but that seemed a little too busy. Here I also started to lighten Hari's face to bring some humanity to the image rather than just a ghostly shadow. At this point you can see the final cover taking shape comp by comp...

From here I returned to one of the first stills I worked with and the first comp I came up with. I applied the flipped-reflection treatment to that ocean still, along with a complete color-overhaul that encompassed a larger spectrum of the planet's look. This image of Solaris' ocean is one of the most beautiful in the film and from the beginning had such potential; flipping it upside down provided a thematic and visual solution (creating negative space for Hari at the top and center of the frame), and after trying so many things in other comps, I was able to return to this background image, apply what I'd learned, add the new title treatment, and finish it up. The approved final cover achieves what we were hoping for-- an elegant and seductive re-design that paid tribute to the psychology and visual beauty of Tarkovsky's film-- and hopefully it does it justice.

The rest of the package was a joy to assemble. Without any pressure to over-design Solaris as a sci-fi movie, I simply plucked the images that I love and seemed strongest thematically, and let Tarkovsky's own visual beauty do most of the work. My goal was for the package and menus to feel elegant, human, and warm. Here are a few peeks at how the booklet and DVD menus ended up looking:

Thanks for reading, and thanks of course to everyone at Criterion for this dream assignment. And I hope anyone reading this will enjoy discovering or re-discovering this sci-fi classic by one of the world's master filmmakers, another of which is coming just around the corner from Janus Films...

Childrens Bookshelf: EXPLORING THE MOON

2011-05-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

Illustrations by mid-century master Lowell Hess. Read more about Hess' work at Today's Inspiration and see more of his illustrations and neat pop-ups at his official website.

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-05-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

Posting from Adelaide in Australia, here's one of many great vintage QUANTAS travel posters by Harry Rogers. I got to hold a koala myself just the other day!

MY POLAND

2011-05-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

Via The Guardian: A new exhibition at the British Library presents the rich history of SF down the ages, from Lucian of Samosata in the 2nd century to the Russian novel that inspired 1984... This 1985 Polish samizdat edition of Zamyatin's 1921 Russian dystopian novel was published in Warsaw. My translates as "We". The novel influenced George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four: set several centuries in the future after the Two Hundred Years’ War has wiped out most of humanity, it takes place in a highly regimented city-state encircled by the "Green Wall", which is supposed to keep out the world.

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-05-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

Walking around in Sydney for the past few days, I've noticed this awesome poster for this year's Vivid Live music festival, and I was pleased to find when I looked it up that it was designed by La Boca, the British design group responsible for those alternate Black Swan posters from last year. I love the colors in their work, especially in this surreal illustration which also reminds me a bit of vintage Japanese graphic design styles.

Process: SOMETHING WILD

2011-05-09T16:16:00.001-07:00

Last fall, I found myself in the strange but fortunate situation of working on two DVD packages for Criterion simultaneously. One of these, Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS, allowed for a long, free-formed process of experimenting and exploration, while the other, Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD, came with a more specific brief. But it ended up being a perfect example of how a simple concept can sometimes be the toughest to execute.

original Something Wild posters

After re-watching the movie, which my good friend Jason introduced me to when we were college roommates, I couldn't resist coming right out of the gate with this Melanie Griffith cover with amped-up 80's pastels:

I was quickly informed that due to contractual obligations, if we were to feature one of the two leads on the cover, we'd have to feature the other (in this case, the great Jeff Daniels) in equal measure. And as much as I was enamored with Griffith's Lulu (as any fan of this movie would be), I knew that this cover should probably try to get under the surface a little more. My art director Sarah challenged me to the assignment of coming up with something featuring an icon or object from the film, avoiding its lead characters completely. We immediately thought of handcuffs, a symbolically-charged prop from two of the movie's most memorable and disparate scenes. I mocked up a cut-out pair of cuffs and, caution to the wind, threw in a heart locked up inside. Cheesiness be damned, the heart could be a perfect and playful indicator that this was a romance and not a cop movie, plus it seemed to work pretty well thematically for a movie whose characters are emotionally locked and chained to one another. Sounds easy enough, but without even realizing it, I soon found myself stuck on autopilot in an 80's Lulu-landscape of color.

These may have been good covers back when the film was originally released, or covers that Lulu herself would have liked. But I needed steering back into the 21st century to re-brand the movie in some way and stay as far away from the visual palettes and cliches of the 80's as possible. It was a case of not seeing the forest for the trees... the very 80's trees. So, keeping the handcuffs and scrapping the rest of the mess I'd made, I started from scratch and asked myself what would be the simplest, most stripped-down graphic I could get away with, looking to Romek Marber's iconic Penguin Crime book covers for inspiration. Presenting Something Wild as romantic-comedy-meets-film-noir was our new goal, and I wanted to convey that dark side, the unique tone shifts that Demme brings into the movie and balances so well. So, starting with stark black and keeping the aquas, pinks and blues as accent colors, I kept it simple and the results felt much better...

I swapped around the colors and tweaked the title treatment to add a little bit of fun back in, and we had our final cover. It was great to be able to go with such a minimalist concept and hopefully it captures the tone and spirit of the movie at the same time. I have new respect for the great poster artists who excel at creating iconic images using no people, stars, characters whatsoever... it's hard! The final cover:

Of course, after deciding to re-style the cover, I had to do the same with my plans for the rest of the package. Seen here are a couple of menus before and after we scrapped the 80's vibe.

Lastly, here's the Blu-ray disc art, an illustration which also appears on the back of the standard DVD case. I thought it would be neat to illustrate other things and moments from the movie throughout the package in the same style as the cover, but ultimately ended up with just this, leaving plenty of room in the menus and booklet for some great photos and stills.

A fun challenge for a really fun movie that I'm so happy to have worked on, made by a director I have a tremendous amount of respect and love for. Something Wild is out on DVD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection on May 12th.

AUSTRALIA/JAPAN TOUR

2011-05-07T12:55:00.001-07:00

I'm off once again to work, this time to Australia, Japan and Korea with Ben Folds. Looking forward to lots of good shows, good sights, good eats, and good books and toys to share when I get back. Check back for some posts along the way. Adios!

5 POLISH BOOK COVERS

2011-05-02T23:16:00.000-07:00

A fun, quick, challenging exercise in paying tribute to the world of modern Polish book cover art, prompted by 50 Watts' contest (open until May 20th). I started with one idea, came out with five, and after a hefty amount of self-critique I let these go and look forward to seeing what everyone else turns in...

1000 POLISH BOOK COVERS

2011-04-22T08:42:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought I had seen it all at the outer limits of the Polish poster, I discover Polish book covers. Fans of Polish art and design have until now relied on fantastic posts at sites like 50 Watts to get their fix. I'm now aware that many of them can be found in a hardback book, curated by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizieliński and entitled One Thousand Polish Book Covers, which seems to be the definitive tome on this incredibly deep and diverse visual world.

For fun, and in celebration of this book's existence, 50 Watts has announced their contest to design a Polish-style cover for your favorite book, with a $400 cash prize. I plan on entering as a fun exercise, and if you're an artist or illustrator, you should too, as its not very hard to get inspired when looking at this stuff.

Here are some of my favorites introduced to me by 50 Watts - all of these images come courtesy of Will Schofield and his valliant work on that blog, so please check out his other posts here and here to see many more. And if Polish childrens books are your thing, feast your eyes on the Mizieliński's mind-blowing personal collection, chronicled on this blog.

INGE K. CIMIC

2011-04-11T14:41:00.000-07:00

Forgotten pumpkins

While traveling in Croatia, I discovered the work of Inge K. Cimic in a Dubrovnik gallery, and brought home these postcards. I know nothing about the artist or where she is from, and I haven't been able to find much of anything about her online. If anyone knows any more information about her or her art, please leave a comment. I love the charming fancifulness of the trees, villages and landscapes and the mystery these images contain, like illustrations from some lost fairy tales.

A big surprise

Winter morning

Winter motif

NASHVILLE FILM FEST POSTER

2011-04-11T09:30:00.001-07:00

I made this poster for this year's Nashville Film Festival which starts this weekend. Inspired by UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES. This poster isn't in print or for sale... just made to encourage people to check out the film and the festival in general.

NORM

2011-04-10T11:20:00.001-07:00

Dave Paulson of The Privates has released a new EP as NORM. He asked me to whip some artwork overnight for the cover. Download the excellent NORM EP on Bandcamp here.

DAVID KLEIN + THE HEIGHTS PLAYERS

2011-04-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

David Klein was an incredibly prolific and influential illustrator who is most well known for his iconic vintage travel posters (about which I will most definitely post again soon), but thanks to one of my favorite blogs Stickers & Stuff, I just stumbled across his posters he made for The Heights Players, a Brooklyn community theater founded in 1956. Klein designed plenty of wonderful posters for proper Broadway shows as well, but these have a remarkable unifying style that is playful, colorful and iconic. I absolutely adore his color schemes and his great lettering, from the playful Saul-Bass style block letters of On the Town and The Caine Mutiny Court Marshall to the perfect modern elegance of his Glass Menagerie title treatment. I'm too inspired to look at these any longer... I must go draw!

Process: SHOAH

2011-03-29T08:40:00.001-07:00

Here is a poster concept for SHOAH that we didn't end up using as the final one-sheet for IFCFilms. There were many, many striking images in Claude Lanzmann's 10-hour holocaust documentary, some more harrowing than others, but all of them beautiful in some way. It was very important to avoid presenting the film as a gloomy or morbid nightmare, because the film itself, difficult as it is to watch at times, is anything but. This was my favorite poster idea, and below is another. For the final poster, I gave a new treatment to an iconic image that was used in the original promotion of the film 25 years ago, both also seen below.

unused poster concept, 2010

original promotional poster, 1985

final theatrical poster design for IFCFilms, 2010

CHILDREN'S BOOKSHELF: Victor Chizhikov

2011-03-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

I found some great old children's books on my most recent trip overseas, and here I present the holy grail of them all, this German edition of a Russian folktake "Wie Der Wolf Ein Liedchen Sang" (something like "A Song Like the Wolf's Song") illustrated by Victor Chizhikov. I found it crammed into a shelf in a tiny magical old bookshop in Berlin. Chizhikov began as a caricaturist and went on to illustrate countless childrens books. He also created the beloved Misha, the mascot character for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. Not much of his artwork seems to be online, so I'm happy to share some pictures from this title which showcases his gorgeous illustrations. Click these to see the details enlarged, and find a few more at my Flickr page.

TOUR FINDS

2011-03-24T14:09:00.001-07:00

Some finds from Berlin, Copenhagen and elsewhere on tour. Pics & posts coming in the future...

50 WATTS

2011-03-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

A Journey Round My Skull, my favorite blog on the internet, is now 50 Watts. And now its even prettier, like its cousin But Does It Float. Curated by the great Will Schofield, 50 Watts highlights fantastic and mysterious found book art and illustrations. Just see it for yourself. Also follow 50 Watts on Twitter, and find the link permanently on the right hand side of my blog for future browsing. Thank you Will for the endless inspiration!

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-03-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

Fun 60's British postal poster that I found while browsing through a bookshop in London. Sometimes it's hard for me to believe that advertising used to look this great. I'll be posting some more tour finds soon...

JERZY FLISAK

2011-03-15T01:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a selection of wonderful film posters by Jerzy Flisak, one of my favorite Polish poster artists. I haven't been able to find out much information about the man other than that he began as a satirical cartoonist (some of his cartoon illustrations can be seen in this untranslated video) and also illustrated children's books and even directed his own animated film. Sadly I haven't found any evidence of either online. Flisak's imagination seems boundless, and more than anything his work inspires me to draw. See more of Flisak's posters here and here. Also: Saturday Evening Poster - The Little Prince (which I'm proud to say is the first Flisak poster I own and have hanging on my wall).

NEIL KELLERHOUSE

2011-03-08T03:19:00.001-08:00

I was introduced to the work of designer Neil Kellerhouse through his covers for the Criterion Collection, realizing that so many of my favorite Criterion covers that I couldn't stop staring at were all designed by the same man. Only after browsing his staggeringly impressive visual resume online did I realize that he's also responsible for the theatrical posters for THE SOCIAL NETWORK, I'M STILL HERE and THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE-- some of the best theatrical posters created in recent memory-- not to mention the freakin' FINDING NEMO title treatment. Dude doesn't mess around.

Neil obviously doesn't need my help promoting his stuff, but nonetheless I wanted to share with any unfamiliar readers some of these beautiful pieces of his. Visit Kellerhouse.com to see more, where he has nicely arranged a flow of images that include peeks at alternate and unused versions of his iconic posters and Criterion covers. I love his creative type arrangements and the overall tone and photographic beauty of his images. For now the man remains a mystery; I would love to see some process posts from him, a blog, or an occasional tweet, if you're out there Neil!

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-03-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

Polish Jaws poster designed by Andrzej Dudzinski, 1977

2011-03-04T01:45:00.000-08:00

My dear friend Jim Ridley, film critic and editor of the Nashville Scene, came by my home studio to talk about movies, posters, music and art for a write-up in this year's People Issue. This accompanying photo of me and Cindy was shot by Eric England. Read the piece here...

CHILDREN'S BOOKSHELF: Tour Finds

2011-03-02T03:39:00.000-08:00

As I hop around Europe (currently writing from Berlin), here are some great childrens book covers I found in various bookshops across the midwest on this past tour. This illustration on the cover of an edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales is one of my favorites I've seen in a while, and I was able to go back to a bookshop in Milwaukee where I saw this over a year ago and get a pic. Some of these are fun and cute, like Seymour Chwast's Alphabet Parade book, and some are quite mysterious, especially the childrens novel "The Min-Min" and the "let's travel by papercraft" book of architectural cut-outs (found at the amazing Zakka Japanese bookstore in Brooklyn). I'll be posting some more covers and pages from some other books I've found in the near future, and hopefully I'll have some finds from Europe as well.

Further reading: Children's Bookshelf - Den Kvite Konkylien

WALDEMAR SWIERZY

2011-02-21T10:35:00.001-08:00

Waldemar Swierzy is one of the most famous and prolific Polish poster artists, having produced over 2500 posters including countless iconic film posters and Cyrk (circus) posters. He's also known for a series of paintings of jazz legends. Here are some of my favorite designs of his. There's a wide range of style on display here, and these selected posters, with the exception of the APOCALYPSE NOW shown below, don't even really showcase his streak/splatter-paint style that could be considered one of his trademarks. I recently picked a great out-of-print book on Swierzy from the kind folk at Posteriatati in New York. Feast your eyes on these.

NEW CRITERION COVERS

2011-02-14T20:59:00.001-08:00

Among today's new title announcements from The Criterion Collection I have two new cover designs, for Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS and Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD. Needless to say, it was a great honor to be asked to work on both of these titles, and it's been fun working on both packages of which I will share more soon. Both come to DVD and Blu-ray in May (10th for Something Wild, 24th for Solaris).

BLACK SWAN variant print

2011-02-14T20:51:00.000-08:00

Here's a one-of-a-kind variant I made of the BLACK SWAN screenprint today at Kangaroo Press in Nashville, just for fun. Using 2 of the 3 screens-- the white screen was left off and the title done with a white pastel-- and the same inks on black French paper instead of the light pink used on the rest of the run.

Here's a crummy picture of how the standard edition of the print turned out.. quite lovely. Thanks to Ryan at Kangaroo Press!

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-02-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

Changing it up a little this week, here's a nice fan-made poster for Christopher Nolan's conclusion to his Batman trilogy, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. There are some great Batman fan posters out there, and there are plenty of not-so-great ones, and that's the way it's always been. I love this one, created by Josh Gilbert aka Shok Zone Studios, simply because it could actually pass for the real deal; it fits into the world Nolan and Warner Brothers have created with the two existing films and their campaigns, and it plays into our collective excitement about this movie by creating the perfect tagline that WB would be amiss not to steal. Visit Shok Zone Studios for more of Josh's work which is incredibly professional and well composed, ranging from hand-drawn illustrations and graphics to an entire catalog of posters and DVD covers he's created just for fun (my favorites include his Speed Racer cover and a teaser poster for a "what if" CALVIN AND HOBBES movie).

BLACK SWAN print

2011-02-07T23:06:00.000-08:00

Now available in my shop is an 18x24" screenprint of the BLACK SWAN poster I made for my 2010 Top Ten project. Three colors, printed on 100 lb French pink lemonade cover stock, signed and numbered limited edition of 30. It will be for sale until Monday, February 14th and shipped out immediately before I head off to Europe for a month. Head over to my shop if you'd like one.

P.S. To readers who have asked about my MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO and BEFORE SUNRISE / BEFORE SUNSET prints, I apologize for the ongoing delays. I had planned to offer these to sell this month as well, but I've been having problems getting the color fields looking exactly as I intended them when printed on an offset machine by a third party. Such is the nature of the beast, trying to find the best way to print a particular design, and as these are two of my favorite designs that I know a lot of people are interested in, I want to make sure they're done right. This might very well lead to me just screenprinting some here in Nashville when I have the next opportunity. Thanks for your patience and support!

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-02-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

The Little Prince Polish film poster, Jerzy Flisak, 1977, 23 x 33".

MARC BOUTAVANT

2011-02-03T11:33:00.001-08:00

Marc Boutavant makes art that appeals to many things I love-- characters, cuteness, great handwritten script, French stuff, animals and travel-- and you can explore his fantastic worlds in his books currently in reprint like Around the World with Mouk, his use of color is playful and beautiful, his characters are iconic (think Richard Scary but French), and his books are great for kids. Love him, can't get enough. Unfortunately the new pressing of the above title doesn't come with the original French words as Boutavant wrote them into the illustrations, BUT it does come with a sheet of cute stickers. Click the above image to see all the evidence you need of Boutavant's awesomeness in full detail.

NEVER LET ME GO Blu-ray+DVD wrap

2011-02-01T15:40:00.000-08:00

Today my favorite film of 2010 was released on DVD and Blu-ray: Mark Romanek's NEVER LET ME GO. I made this alternate Blu-ray wrap based on my poster design for the film, for anyone who might prefer it to the officially released cover. By clicking the image below, you can view the wrap at full size, download it and print it out however you wish, using the provided crop marks to cut it to the correct size. I'm posting a standard DVD wrap below the Blu-ray wrap as well. Hopefully fans of this film, and anyone who wanted to see it but hasn't yet, will pick up a DVD or Blu-ray to help show Fox Searchlight that this movie won't be easily forgotten. Enjoy!

Blu-ray wrap:

standard DVD wrap:

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-01-26T13:51:00.000-08:00

A Fistful of Dollars, by poster design gurus The Heads of State.
Made for the Alamo Drafthouse's Rolling Roadshow 2008,
looks like it was a 3-color screenprint at a whopping 24x36".

Childrens Bookshelf: COLOS

2011-01-25T17:49:00.001-08:00

I found this strange vintage children's book today at a great shop in Champaign, IL, entitled The Student Who Became a King In Spite of Himself. The illustrator is Francois Szalay, also known as Colos, a Hungarian-born designer who specialized in collage, often incorporating stamps into his work as seen in some of these images. This was his first children's book. Below the images from this book I'm also including a couple of pages from his 14-year collage diary which looks really interesting.

ALVIN LUSTIG

2011-01-25T11:12:00.001-08:00

Alvin Lustig is one of my design heroes. He went blind and died at a young age. These are some of his amazing book covers. To see more of these and appreciate them more fully, get your hands on a copy of this incredible book seen above, profiled here by Grain Edit.

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-01-22T20:47:00.001-08:00

Vertigo, Roman Cieslewicz, 1963, 23 x 33 in.

TRISTEN

2011-01-20T22:01:00.000-08:00

Out February 1st on American Myth is the full-length debut of Tristen, an incredible artist that I've been fortunate enough to play with on occasion in her band and with my 90's tribute supergroup My So-Called Band (you may have heard Tristen join us for "Lovefool" or "Criminal"). I don't have any samples to post, you're just going to have to trust me on this one. Get on iTunes or Amazon, listen to some samples and pre-order Charlatans at the Garden Gate, one of the finest releases to come out of Nashville these days. You can even download the single here for free. I really can't speak highly enough of Tristen. You won't be disappointed and you'll thank me when she's big and famous. And if you happen to be in Nashville tonight, see her release show at the Basement.

UNCLE KENT

2011-01-20T08:35:00.001-08:00

I just did this poster for IFCFilms for Joe Swanberg's UNCLE KENT, a charming and funny film playing at Sundance this year. This image is one that we liked and thought would work great as a poster, but with a treatment that felt more in the style of a graphic novel by the likes of someone like Jeffrey Brown or Adrian Tomine. Check out UNCLE KENT at Sundance or OnDemand from IFCFilms.

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2011-01-15T15:15:00.001-08:00

Amelie, Japanese poster, 20 x 29 inches. A reproduction of this is currently on my wall. I love the negative space, the script and the scene.

I've tried to forget the night that we lived

2011-01-14T22:57:00.001-08:00

This is the best song I've heard in a long time

or at least since this one

2011

2011-01-13T07:33:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year from Sam's Myth... A few new things to share:

I just wrapped up this theatrical poster for IFCFilms for THE HOUSEMAID, a new remake of the classic Korean thriller. I saw this as a double feature with the original at Fantastic Fest this past year in Austin, so it was pretty neat to be asked to work on this poster. It's a great remake in that it doesn't tread to heavily on the original, but finds new elements in the story to explore, particularly the sexy. THE HOUSEMAID comes to theaters and On-Demand at the end of January. I've also just finished another theatrical poster that I'm excited to share soon.

Thanks to everyone for the outpouring of comments, links, and enthusiasm for my Top 10 of 2010 poster project. I'm glad a lot of you enjoyed this experiment of mine and liked some of the designs. I've had some people ask if prints will be available of any of these, and while there are no concrete plans right now to make digital prints or screenprints, I see some great potential in a screenprint of the BLACK SWAN design or an offset run of the Mark-Romanek-endorsed NEVER LET ME GO poster for fellow fans of that movie. If I get it together, I'll be sure to let everyone know. Thanks again for following me on this humbling little project.

Paying one last tribute to the year in film, I made my annual compilation of my favorite film scores from 2010. If you know me you know I'm a film score junkie, and I always look forward to assembling this playlist each year. You can stream this year's mix, featuring compositions by Rachel Portman, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Nigel Godrich, Sylvain Chomet, Alexandre Desplat & others here on 8Tracks.

The above illustration pays tribute to Gustav Holst's orchestral suite THE PLANETS, which will be performed next month by the Nashville Symphony. Each month, the symphony's program book cover features a different artist's interpretation of the month's selections and I was thrilled to be asked and assigned The Planets. This piece will appear on the February program cover.

I realized I hadn't updated my portfolio site in a while, so samsmyth.net is current once again. Thanks to everyone who's been coming by the blog and sharing links with friends and readers. Things may slow down a bit in the next month as I head back out on tour with Ben Folds, but I'll still have some new exciting things to share that I've been working on (particularly if you're a fan of the Criterion Collection), so please come back soon. Thanks again!

TOP 10 OF 2010: #1

2011-01-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

I made this design for my favorite film of the year, Mark Romanek's NEVER LET ME GO, a few months ago after I saw the film. I actually really liked the original poster, a dreamy photo of Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan running down a pier (a location in the movie, although we don't see this moment in the film), and I remembered one of my favorite shots of the three main characters looking out to the sea together. If you've seen the film, it's a key scene... maybe THE key scene in the whole film, and this image which I simply speckled up and stylized ever so slightly from Romanek's original frame (shot by cinematographer Adam Kimmel) seemed to represent perfectly so much about this film and story. I can't remember a time in which I was more disappointed and confused about a film not finding an audience. There are so many reasons that this movie should have been seen by a wide group of people, and for whatever reason it wasn't. Meeting Mark Romanek after I saw NEVER LET ME GO at Fantastic Fest and getting to tell him how much the film affected me was one of the top moments of my year, and I hope he knows how much it means to a lot of other people out there too. It's a future classic that's already waiting to be discovered.

A few other notes on 2010. I watched a record low number of new movies, yet managed to see almost everything I'd heard was of quality that interested me, which I'm very proud of. The greatest (and funniest and most entertaining) piece of film criticism I encountered this year was a series of video reviews of the STAR WARS prequels by Mike Stoklasa, aka Red Letter Media. For the second year in a row, the greatest technical achievement in the art of motion picture filmmaking belongs to the BBC, for their series LIFE, worth alone the purchase of a Blu-ray player and 52" HD TV. The best thing this year in the movies was Nigel Godrich's 8-bit Universal overture at the beginning of SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD. The best credit sequence of the year was for Gaspar Noe's ENTER THE VOID, a movie I loved the first time and hated the second time. My favorite performances of the year, besides the three outstanding leads of NEVER LET ME GO, were from Jesse Eisenberg, Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Lawrence and Edgar Ramirez. The next dozen or so movies that I loved this year beyond my top ten: EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, TRASH HUMPERS, COLLAPSE, LAST TRAIN HOME, EVERYONE ELSE, I AM LOVE, A PROPHET, CARLOS, SWEETGRASS, ANOTHER YEAR, RESTREPO and SOMEWHERE. I was pretty disappointed in both INCEPTION and SHUTTER ISLAND, though I consider both to be major successes in Hollywood filmmaking/moviegoing. The best film I saw this year still seeking distribution for next was Jang Cheol-Su's BEDEVILLED. Some movies I really wanted to see but still haven't yet include WHITE MATERIAL, GREENBERG, THE FIGHTER, INSIDE JOB, THE TOWN, MICMACS, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, BIUTIFUL, THE THORN IN THE HEART and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON. My favorite scores of the year, which I have listened to incessantly and more than any other music, have been Rachel Portman's NEVER LET ME GO, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross' SOCIAL NETWORK, Sylvain Chomet's THE ILLUSIONIST, and John Adams' music used in I AM LOVE. The person I hated the most in 2010 was Tim Burton, and the person I loved the most was Andrew Garfield. I fell asleep during HOT TUB TIME MACHINE and THE KING'S SPEECH, cried during RABBIT HOLE, LAST TRAIN HOME and NEVER LET ME GO, and didn't walk out of any movies in 2010. Movies that I haven't mentioned yet but should somewhere: WILD GRASS, BABIES, MOTHER and KICK-ASS. I generally thought it was another good year for movies, even though it wasn't as good as others recently. The film I'm excited most for next year is Terrence Malick's TREE OF LIFE. As for the worst movie of the year, I honestly cannot determine which was a more grotesquely mammoth waste of time, energy and money between TRON LEGACY and THE LAST AIRBENDER. Probably the latter, but boy it's close.

Below I'm recapping my favorite posters I made for this project. Originally I wanted to design ten posters for my ten favorite movies of the year as an exercise in liberation; I could try new unorthodox ideas, work on my hand-drawing and lettering, things I've neglected and needed an excuse to work on. Life got hectic the last month or two of 2010 though, and I thought I'd have to bail on the idea. At the last minute I decided that it would be better to at least give it a try, even if the results were half-assed, and to just embrace the process. Get some ideas down, see which ones stick, see which ones have potential, and then move onto the next one, which was very hard to do with some of these that I felt could be much better, used more work. I came out with a couple of things I'm really proud of, a few I'm not so proud of, but all in all it was a fun creative project that paid tribute to the films that affected me the most this year. And it's something that I don't think anyone has really done before, perhaps understandably. Listmaking is inherently irrational, nonsensical, personal and messy, kind of like the creative process.

TOP 10 OF 2010: #2

2011-01-05T17:38:00.000-08:00

My second favorite film of the year (and if you know me or have kept up with my blatherings all year, you know my favorite at this point) was Sylvain Chomet's resurrection of Jacques Tati's unrealized screenplay THE ILLUSIONIST. This is a profoundly beautiful and moving animated film (a perfect marriage of hand-drawn animation and computer assistance) that is both a tribute to Tati's work and life, and distinctively a Sylvain Chomet film (his last feature, which like this one was almost completely dialogue-free, was the wonderful and acclaimed THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE). It's tricky coming up with a poster idea for an animated film whose characters have already been rendered in such a memorable way, but I took the opportunity to come up with my own illustration anyways, partially inspired by the illustrations of vintage Tati posters, partly just to have an excuse to illustrate some characters. I also definitely wanted to present the movie as a story about these two characters and the relationship between them. As a side note, I actually pitched a few rough ideas to Sony Pictures Classics for an ILLUSIONIST poster, which I'll post below just to share some more insight into wrapping one's head around marketing such a unique animated film:

TOP 10 OF 2010: #3

2011-01-04T21:29:00.000-08:00

This movie already had a great poster, and while I found myself thinking of lots of great conceptual ideas for the story told in this movie, I couldn't figure out how to execute them. Meanwhile I'm looking at all of these Blue Note album covers and old Penguin covers that say so much with just an arrangement of shapes, and I wanted to try to see how far I could get with this film's themes: Design, communication, position, weight, strategy, connection, closeness, isolation, loneliness.

TOP 10 OF 2010: #4

2011-01-04T08:29:00.000-08:00

After watching Yorgos Lanthimos' Greek film DOGTOOTH a few nights ago, I had to rapidly reshuffle my top ten list admist this project (EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP was sadly the casualty in this case), and I got great pleasure in making something as strange and fucked up as possible for this strange, fucked up movie that hardly anyone reading this blog has had the chance to see yet. DOGTOOTH has traveled the festival circuit for the past 2 years, released on a limited scale here in the states this year, and as for what the film is about and how this poster relates to it, I'll let this speak for itself and hopefully entice some readers to seek out this funny and disturbing movie. But it was fun playing around with this compositional style and making something totally abstract, something I'd like to do a lot more of.

Three more to go, and I should add that larger versions of each poster can be found on my Flickr page in all their flawed hi-res glory.

TOP 10 OF 2010: #5

2011-01-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

Okay so it's another big head poster... this is becoming a trend in this series... but in my defense, originally I wanted to find a good usable image of the back of Clooney's head for this one-- its a shot that director Anton Corbijn hones in on over and over in the film and I really like the subjectivity it conveys (see also: ENTER THE VOID), but I couldn't find one in any trailers or stills. So I just played around and perhaps fell back on some standard tricks to come up with something to post today. I love the original poster, which ended up becoming one inspiration for my CARLOS poster, and don't feel I could improve on it much other than to do something more elegant and moody to compliment the tone of Corbijn's film, which feels like the closest thing to a 60's euro-thriller to come out of Hollywood in a while, at least this year.

TOP 10 OF 2010: #6

2011-01-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

Here's an example of running out of time amidst a project like this. For BLUEBEARD, one of my favorite films of the year, I wanted to convey the spirit of the feminine that permeates this film in a way that previous versions of this tale lacked, but ended up having to just bang out a quick illustration. I at least got in the book and the red room, which is good enough for today. Definitely a demo.

top 10 OF 2010: #7

2011-01-01T10:49:00.000-08:00

It was pretty hard trying to come up with a poster design for a film that already has such specific iconography, so I went with something totally abstract that came to me: the idea of a child's imagination and the world he imagines his toys coming from; The opening of Toy Story 3 explores this idea as we see Woody and the gang on an adventure in the west, only to realize that it's all just part of the world inside Andy's imagination. So that was the idea here-- the western landscape representing Woody's world and the cosmos above representing Buzz's-- and that for every child, there's a whole imaginary universe where they and their toys go to escape, explore and dream. Happy New Year!

TOP 10 of 2010: #8

2010-12-31T09:03:00.000-08:00

I wanted to do something much more thematic with this one but ended up just playing around until something looked kinda pretty. The white specks can be snow or stars-- two images that stuck with me from the film. A little disappointed with this one but that's part of the nature of this kind of project.

TOP TEN OF 2010: #9

2010-12-30T08:49:00.000-08:00

I guess I have a thing for big head posters-- my ideas for House, Modern Times, Shoah, Labyrinth, Vivre Sa Vie, Black Swan and now Winter's Bone all utilize a big mug front and center-- but with a face like Jennifer Lawrence's I couldn't help myself. The more you look at this photo of her the more it looks like she's smiling-- a strange contrast to the demeanor of her character through most of Debra Granik's excellent WINTER'S BONE. I love black and white images, so this was an excuse to play around with these patterns and stare at my Jenny #2* for a while. A few of these are on sale at the Belcourt right now as part of my little gallery show.

Tomorrow, another big head poster!

TOP 10 of 2010: #10

2010-12-29T07:50:00.000-08:00

I used to write about movies. I even got a degree in writing about movies. As I've written less, my skills have atrophied while other hobbies, interests and things have stepped in, like making more visual art. Last year, instead of writing about my favorite movies of the year, I came up with an art project instead: the 2009 film stamp collection. This year, I wanted to come up with an even more ridiculously irrational and ambitious project: crafting a quick movie poster for ten of my favorites films from this year. I figured I'd spend just about the same amount of time on each as I would writing 250-500 words, but I would get a chance to play around visually with pens, paper and the computer in a medium I have so come to love: poster art.

This project is ridiculous, outrageous, and above all personal. My initial idea was to create off-the-cuff poster art for these films that defied any rules, boundaries or requirements one might have when making a "real" poster that would get released to the world. Inevitably, I've ended up wanting to spend more time with each one making them "better," but my goal has been to bang out ten poster ideas with no filters, no tinkering, no expectation for perfection. Each one of these, if they were being released to the world, I of course would want to perfect a little more. I like to think of them as demos; sketches, concepts, ideas for posters that could be. To make this project even more complicated and surreal, a couple of my favorite films of the year I've already made posters for, either for fun on my own (TRASH HUMPERS) or for an actual studio (CARLOS). Those movies will be absent from the project, as will the many 2010 films I haven't seen yet: WHITE MATERIAL, ANOTHER YEAR, THE KING'S SPEECH... full list to follow.

So hopefully other poster fans out there will enjoy this peek into my scattered brain, these imperfect tributes to the movies from this year that had some kind of strong effect on me. Yesterday's prelude to this project was a poster for UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES; today I give slot #10 to Darren Aronofsky's BLACK SWAN. I thought the mirror images in the film seemed like almost a red herring whereas more often we saw Natalie actually fractured and splitting apart, which is what's happening to her character. So I avoided any mirroring and split her into glitchy pieces, still suggesting that there are "two" of her... Add a light pink backdrop (the color of her room) and a nice script, upload and post.

Stay tuned for 9 more! As always, things will pile up over at my Flickr page. Leave a comment and tell me what your favorites were this year.

TOP 10 OF 2010: A Prelude

2010-12-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

2010: the Year of the Ghost Monkey. I made this poster for UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Palme D'Or winning Thai film that has US distribution from Strand Releasing in 2011, because I thought that the existing international posters (surveyed nicely by Adrian Curry in this Movie Poster of the Week column), while all interesting in different ways, didn't really tap into the actual look and tone of the film. This image, used in the other posters too, is without a doubt one of the most already-iconic film images in recent memory, but I wanted to see what it would look like in a darker, less saturated treatment that still has a graphic element and embraces the complex details of the image. Strand Releasing, if you're listening, I think something like this would be aces for the US arthouse crowd, and Mondo if you're listening, this could also make for a killer glow-in-the-dark screenprint. :)

This post informally begins the rollout of my year-end project in which I have attempted to create ten off-the-cuff poster designs for my favorite films of the year. Most listmakers have been giving BOONMEE 2011 status, as it was only screened in the US at festivals this year, so my top ten project will begin officially with my next post... if I finish it! Stay tuned...

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

2010-12-11T21:04:00.000-08:00

US poster for Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, 1968, 27x40", designer unknown. One of my all-time favorites.

TIM & ERIC POSTER

2010-12-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

I made these over at Boss Construction yesterday for the Tim & Eric show in Nashville last night. For some reason the promoter said they couldn't sell the posters, which I'd never heard of happening with a gig poster before, but anyways now you can grab one from me at my shop. 2-color 18x24" hand-pulled, signed & numbered edition of 50, no two are alike, lots of crazy colors and you'll get a random print from the batch. I love Tim & Eric and it was a trip seeing their live show complete with Pusswhip Banggang live in concert and Dr. Steve Brule himself. So grab some "Jambalaya," "Come Over" and pick up a print... just "Don't Call Me Uncle!"

SHOAH

2010-11-30T09:10:00.001-08:00

I'm proud to present the poster I designed for Claude Lanzmann's SHOAH, an epic documentary about the survivors of the Holocaust that has been considered by many to be one of the greatest works of documentary filmmaking ever produced. The film, nearly ten hours long in total, is a profoundly beautiful work, an essential masterpiece of the cinema that has an unforgettable effect on anyone who watches it. The man on the train in the poster is one of many Holocaust survivors who were interviewed by Lanzmann 25 years ago in an effort to create a "new" history of what happened there; these interviews are intercut with some of the most hauntingly beautiful cinematography you'll ever see as Lanzmann revisits the locations and landmarks that were the scenery to this historic nightmare. SHOAH is one of the great important works of film-- I would go further to say that its one of the great important works of art ever created by a human being-- and I couldn't be more humbled to have worked on this poster in celebration of the re-release. It tours theatrically in the coming months courtesy of IFCFilms for its 25th Anniversary.

SHOW!

2010-11-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

For the month of December, a selection of my film poster art will be on display at the Gallery at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville. There will be a little opening on the evening of Thursday December 2nd coinciding with the village Art Walk. Select prints will be for sale in limited quantities. This is the first "show" I've ever had so stop by, have a glass of wine and say hello!

BEN FOLDS BENEFIT POSTER

2010-11-22T15:25:00.000-08:00

These 18x24 offset prints will be for sale at the Ben Folds concert benefiting the Nashville Symphony and local volunteer firefighters Saturday November 27th at TPAC. All proceeds from sales of the poster will go to this cause in the wake of the Nashville Flood, which hit the basement of the Schermerhorn Center pretty hard. If you're in Nashville, grab a ticket, grab a poster, enjoy the show, and support a great cause and one of our city's treasures.

Process: CARLOS

2010-11-19T09:54:00.001-08:00

Olivier Assayas' epic international thriller CARLOS is set to open this weekend at Nashville's historic Belcourt Theatre, one stop on a roadshow around the country that isn't to be missed. I was honored to design the theatrical poster for IFC, and the process was rather brief. Thematically, we wanted to capitalize on this idea of Carlos as an iconic celebrity, with as much danger and sexiness embedded into the presentation as possible. Stylistically, I looked to the posters for various international thrillers of the late 60's and 70's, with their prominent taglines and quotes, bold fields of color and borders... a style outlined very well by Adrian Curry in this Movie Poster of the Week piece. I hoped to capture this same spirit without getting too campy, referential or ironic, and create a poster that felt vintage but also contemporary.

I went right to this shot of Carlos walking off a plane in his signature outfit, half-reaching for a bag on his shoulder containing who knows what kind of dangerous weapons... He's walking with supreme baddass confidence, he's obviously been jet setting around, and he's on a mission. It was perfect for how I wanted to present Carlos and how I think Assayas wanted to present the character in the film. I initially tried it black and white with a little blue, one where the whole poster was yellow with shades of red and orange, and then various versions with white backgrounds and different color schemes on top of Carlos (we ultimately liked the orange one the best). Below I've posted an alternate poster concept I worked on for a little while before setting on the final poster. The title treatment seen in both posters is a modified version of Fat Albert inspired by the SERPICO poster/typeface, and I used Eurostile for all of the billing.

The special roadshow edition of CARLOS plays this weekend at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, where you can also pick up a limited edition program guide that I designed. Read the Scene's interview with Assayas here. Thanks again to everyone at IFC!

Process: MODERN TIMES

2010-11-17T08:19:00.001-08:00

When Criterion asked me to try my hand at a design for Charlie Chaplin's MODERN TIMES, I was quite intimidated. It's the first Chaplin film to join the Criterion Collection's esteemed pantheon, and its one of those films you'll run into quite regularly if you're browsing through lists of the best and most beloved films of all time. I was given free reign to come up with whatever ideas I wanted to try, so after watching the movie again (it had been a while) I started doodling in my sketchbook. I don't have scans of those pages with me, but that process led to some rough drawings like these:

And, later that night, some cut construction paper collages like this:

I knew that it was going to be important to represent the modern city as a major character in the artwork, but also that I needed to feature Chaplin himself. The above cartoon of Chaplin's hat becoming a kind of cityscape / landscape had some potential, and it would come up again later. The yellow drawing above touched on a vision I had in my mind of a massive cartoon landscape that showed both the looming industrial city with its giant buildings and gears as well as the natural landscape, with the gears and the hills blending together, and in a more polished version of this concept I imagined a great volume of tiny details-- people, cars, shops, trains, houses, trees, a whole miniature modern world contrasting the modern city to the open American landscape. These initial sketches and doodles served as a way to explore the themes I wanted to focus on while also providing some graphic and textural templates to work with, like the above paper cityscape which would later end up serving as the template for the entire package.

This led to a cover idea that I envisioned as a landscape of gears. The images of Chaplin crawling around and through these massive factory gears are some of the most well-known in movie iconography, and I was initially hesitant to use the gear imagery just since its so obvious. At the same time, if a good design came of the gears I didn't want to rule them out, as some things are obvious because they have good reason to be. Initially, we considered the possibility of using die-cut holes in a cardboard slipcase, where images of Chaplin would slide through the die-cut openings and reveal different moments and scenes. So I made this unfinished "gearscape" layout with that idea in mind.

Meanwhile, I had sketched out two other simple ideas that I thought might work for the cover. The first featured the last shot of the film. I hate to spoil it for anyone reading this, and if you don't want to know what that shot is you might stop here, but I also had the thought that if there were ever a last shot to give away in a poster or cover, this would be a good contender... It's just that good. And what I really, really loved about it was that it showed both Chaplin and his wife at the time, Paulette Godard, and the film is ultimately about these two characters, as a couple. I loved that idea, and although it wasn't ultimately represented in the cover, I tried to spread this theme out through the rest of the package and menus later. This image wasn't the ideal choice for the Criterion cover because it didn't really address any of the modern or technological themes of the movie. The image of the couple walking away had also been used in existing posters and we wanted to try to create some new iconography for the film.

Another doodle led to this concept of Chaplin's face with mismatched gears for eyes. Here I was really inspired by the Czech and Polish posters I love that used a decisively abstract style and didn't necessarily concern themselves with matching the look or story of the film they represented. The black rounded border and some of my type experiments were conceived as a direct homage to these kinds of posters.

When my art director and I started talking about it though, we realized it actually worked quite well thematically as well as graphically, in that the movie is about Chaplin's Tramp becoming a part of the industrial machine and going kinda crazy in the process. I thought about the famous, amazing book cover (and later, movie poster) for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE designed by David Pelham that shows Alex with his bowler hat and eyelashes that resemble gears, but since Burgess & Kubrick's Alex owed so much to Chaplin's iconic look in the first place, I wasn't really worried about drawing the comparison. The gang at Criterion thought this was the most striking cover idea, so we proceeded with applying the famous Criterion branding and working on a title treatment. This was just matter of finding the perfect typeface to use and we had some help from a period typeface connoisseur who recommended some of these including Juanita, the typeface we ultimately used in a tiny strip along the bottom of the image. Throughout the process, we also refined the actual image of Charlie's face to make it a little less abstract than my original concept. I must have tried about 50 different type and layout variations, but we finally found one that felt just right.

From there it was time to start on the menus and booklet. While Criterion Blu-ray menus are built around one image or video with an overlaid interactive menu, their DVDs use multiple menus for each special feature, chapter menu, etc. I had a lot of fun working with some cut-out paper illustrations and integrating them with images from the film. Here I had the opportunity to play with all of Chaplin's personas, sequences and locations within the movie, aside from the industrial gear & factory imagery everyone associates with it, and really create my own playful visual world. I applied this style to the booklet as well, the cover of which used my earlier hat-city idea and became a screenprint for the Belcourt's Chaplin Festival. Here are some selected images from the menu and booklet art:

I came up with the above image as an homage to that last shot of the film, "SMILE" being the theme song of that section and the song that closes the film. This image, without the text, became the back cover of the booklet.

It was a tremendous honor to work on this release and once again I fell in love with this movie while working on the package. Sifting through hundreds of publicity stills and behind-the-scenes photos from the Chaplin Archives was as wonderful a treat as any movie lover could hope for, and I hope that all the Chaplin fans out there enjoy seeing some of those great images in the booklet and supplements. Janus Films is touring the new Chaplin prints around the country right now and I've been surprised how many people I know have admitted they've never even sat down and watched a Charlie Chaplin movie all the way through. If any are playing near you, check them out and get ready to be moved and entertained. At home, you can enjoy Criterion's MODERN TIMES Blu-ray and DVD, for sale now. Thanks again to Sarah Habibi, Abbey Lustgarden and everyone else at Criterion for this incredible opportunity.

WILLIAM TYLER - BEHOLD THE SPIRIT

2010-11-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

Coming November 23rd on LP and CD from Tompkins Square: William Tyler's Behold the Spirit. The above album cover photography is by Mike Vallera, and I had the honor of doing the overall layout and design for my dear friend William. This is his first record released under his own name (his last full-length was released as The Paper Hats) and as you would expect from any musical endeavor by Mr. Tyler (Lambchop, The Silver Jews, Kort) it is an essential title for your music library. Beautiful instrumental, guitar-centric compositions that you can hear for yourself for a limited time courtesy of NPR at this link. I'm so happy to be even marginally involved in the release of this wonderful record, a perfect soundtrack for the changing of the seasons and the coming winter. Check it out and support your local indie record store by picking up a copy. Enjoy!

THE KING'S SPEECH

2010-11-14T19:45:00.000-08:00

This is stupid, but after all the making fun of the official poster for THE KING'S SPEECH-- one of this year's Oscar-bait dramadies about Britain's King George VI (Colin Firth) and his speech therapist-- I decided to take a few minutes and give it the Polish poster treatment for fun. It's crap and it's rough (King George VI mashed with period-era microphone), but I wanted to see if a completely abstract, tonally inaccurate design could make for just as good a poster as the old standby floating-head-montage poster that we were treated to with this one. I don't really know the answer, but it was a fun 30-minute experiment!