cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
With activity ramping up for me at the Northern Voice conference this week, my window for MADI (Making Art Damn It) is closing, hence here I sit working an hour on a faux book cover for the I Can Read Movies assiognment:
Create a film-based book cover using
the aesthetic framed by SpacesicSee the original images
I’d seen people do this one before, but was a first for me. I tried recalling movies I was drawn to as a kid, and the original Andromeda Strain was one I watched a few times, maybe it was the sci-fi escape the suburbs thing, maybe it was the allure of the southwest as a foreign land for a kid on the east coast, maybe it was the mad science angle.
The one thing that I did recall, and could not find too many elements was the notion that there were these five levels of the underground Wildfire facility, and things got worse as you went down (was this a precursor to War Games use of DEFCON levels?).
What I did find was one graphic image of the structure at the University of Michigan Science Filmsite
And the Wildfire logo (though this looks like from the more recent one but it harkens back to some of the book covers
I used as a base the spacesic image for The Labrything, filling the cover in with black, and in GIMP using the noise filters to .. make noise, and mushed things around with the smudge tool.
For the images, a=I frankly lost track of what I did! I used some layer modes, and I think the cartoon filter on the model. I wavered on just o=using one of the images, but could not decide, so I layered them and made the wildfire logo faded.
Whats it mean? We ought to be careful of things that fall from space and how the government handles them… especially if we live in Piedmont New Mexico.
Great cover and it looks like your getting more and more comfortable with GIMP.
And I’m partial to a quote from Ruth as a tagline, “Establishment gonna fall down and go boom.”
Nice; what a great movie for the assignment.
I thought a lot about other film designs riffing on the patterning that spacesick pulls off so well. What kinds of designs did you imagine before settling on this one?
All the best,
C
@Chad I did not have too specific idea- I work more emergently. I had thought there were signs for the levels in the Wildfire facility, but once I searched around (mainly google images to get design ideas) I found the logo and the tower image. The ones I did not use were some that had the graphic form of the hazmat suits.
Thanks for the feedback- I did not do it as strictly with the simple vector graphic style of the spacesick collection as I might have desired.
Oh…by the way I like the pun on Andromeda (andromedia) Strain.
Nice grungy, gritty, dark and biohazardy background. I also like the virulent green type. Thanks for showing the images you started with, the final transformation looks appropriately sinister.