Here’s my go at the Lyric Typography Poster, which is located here.
In honor of me going to see them this weekend, I choose the Radiohead classic, Everything In Its Right Place. I’m sure many of you listen to them so I’ll spare the description.
Made this in Photoshop. I wanted to use graph paper as a background because I wanted to illustrate obsessive neatness, which is what I believe the song to be about. Modernist graphic design comes to mind when I listen to this song. That came into play when choosing Helvetica (haters gonna hate).
On a slightly different note, listen to this song and gaze at the work of Michael Johansson, I think they blend quite perfectly.
I started remaking this poster as bava art, but then I realized that nobody fits this poster better than the great Stephen Downes. Nobody more prolific, nobody more willing to speak his mind, and nobody less afraid to piss other people off! NOBODY!
All that said, nobody could be further away from the Facebook idea of corporate control and lock-in, which I guess is the joke. I’m gonna file this under the “If movie posters told the truth” design assignment, but that isn’t exactly what this is. Anyway, this was too much fun to make.
Below is a 10 minute screencast outlining how to create an animated magazine cover using Photoshop. Thanks go to Ben Rimes for the inspiration as well as to Melanie for the perceived need. I’ll be doing another one for GIMP shortly, but the same general logic applies for both applications, it’s just easier in Photoshop. Keep in mind I don’t talk about how to create an animated GIF in this tutorial. I recommend creating your animated GIF first, and you can do that using Tom Woodward’s tutorial for Photoshop here or mine for GIMP here. Also, the following video is best watched in fullscreen to catch any and all detail.
Alright everyone. Finally put this blog up for ds106, a massive online open course. Things have been a bit hectic lately so I’m a bit behind but I look forward to participating. I’ve never been too great about writing about my daily thoughts and inspirations but I’mma do my best. Please don’t mind the default theme I’m rocking at the time of this post, I am going to make cosmetic changes this week.
For those that are interested, I plan to post about music, food, drink, the goings on in my life, posting art work I’ve created, and anything else that strikes my interest (big nerd, you can expect tech posts and other nerdy things). Look for a few Daily Create entries later this week.
Some inspiration to beat the summer heat – Japanese snowboarding video:
I bring you this so I can share the tutorial for creating an animated magazine (or movie poster) that is to soon follow. This is a brand new ds106 design assignment, and you can find it here. Now back to polishing off the tutorial—it’s actually a lot easier than you would think. The original magazine cover is here if you would like to do a little comparison.
Update: Video tutorial for this assignment posted here.
I figured I would do one more visual assignment before we move into my favorite part of ds106 bar none, DESIGN!! I chose the “Creep on a movie scene” by the great Jack Mulrey because it is very much inline with my movie saturated mindset right now. I creeped on Alien using this screenshot from the film and this picture taken by Tom Woodward back in 2008. The picture of me is all wrong because there’s direct sunlight on the right side of my face—and given we are in a cafeteria in deep space that’s probably not gonna fly too well. Nonetheless, I kinda liked it. Anyway, here I am as part of the crew of the Nostromo, and given my coffee and cigarette I think I fit right in with these badass mofos.
I was watching the noir cult classic Kiss Me Deadly for the first time in many years last night. It’s an amazing film, and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it. And when you consider both Kiss Me Deadly and Night of the Hunter were made the same year, one would have to assume 1955 would remain the most important year for hardcore film violence until 1967-68 when Bonnie & Clyde and The Wild Bunch are released. Kiss Me Deadly is deeply disturbing on many levels, but unlike Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch little of it happens on screen, it’s all offscreen but communicated psychically with kicking feet, ear piercing screams, and deeply disturbing instruments of torture. Kiss Me Deadly is a textbook example of how to haunt and horrify the audience by creating a simple image that forces viewers to interpolate the horror.
But I told you all that, just to tell you this. While watching the first 10 minutes of Kiss Me Deadly (one of the greatest intros of any film ever) I realized that the title for the blog that transformed the way I imagined animated GIFs, If we don’t, remember me, was from the intro to Kiss Me Deadly. You can see it at 8:25 of this clip on YouTube. I can’t say I was totally surprised since the proprietor of the IWDRM blog obviously knows and loves film, but I was struck when I went back to the IWDRM archives to find there isn’t one animated GIF from Kiss Me Deadly, so the following GIF is my meager homage to both the great Kiss Me Deadly as well as the proprietor of IWDRM, whose art has inspired me to have fun not only thinking about, but in some real way interacting with, all those scenes that have so deeply affected me over the course of my movie watching life.
And this next GIF is not so much an homage as it is a capturing of what has gotta be one of the earliest telephone message machines in cinema. When I first saw this Kiss Me Deadly in L.A. during the early 1990s I was dumbstruck by the presence of a telephone answering machine in the 1950s, how could it be? Turns out the first commercially available answering machine was available in 1949—how crazy is that? Some one should do a animated GIF homage to all answering machine in film
Just so that people don’t think I am relying entirely on animated GIFs for this week’s visual assignments, here are a couple of Triple Troll Quotes. What’s more, they are themed—both of thee triple troll quotes are centered around an actor who was in a number of amazing films in a very short period of time.
First, between 1977 and 1983 Harrison Ford was in Star Wars (1977), Apocalypse Now! (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Blade Runner (1982) (all within 5 years!). What’s even more remarkable about this is he couldn’t act to save his life. Ford was an icon for me as a kid, but in the 2000s I began to like him less and less given his dismissal of Charles Bronson’s career, which I’ve already discussed on this blog. Regardless, he was in the holy trinity of films for me as a kid: Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Blade Runner—what ever I may think of him now, that’s a pretty sick run.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
