Screen Art: The Thing

Screen Art: Finding images in films that transcend their context.



Let's see, I haven't done one of these in a long time.

This shot from John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) may not look particularly beautiful or noteworthy by itself at first glance. I mean, sure, it's a picture of a head stretching and screaming in ways no human could, but aside from that, no big deal, right?

Well, I've thought for a while that if you crop it like this...


... well, then, sir, you got yourself a movie poster. Since I'm on some kind of crazy poster designing kick lately, I'll go ahead and add it to my to-do list, a long with that other Prestige poster I want to do and the Straw Dogs poster I'm currently tinkering with in my spare time. Yes, sir, I do believe a post for The Thing using the picture above as a basis would be pretty cool indeed. Reminds me of the poster of Pink Floyd's The Wall.

The Criterion Collection of Videogames (cont'd.)

Okay, I can't help it. I've got to post some more of these. They're just too cool.










Now here's a great game just begging for the GAF Collection treatment. The original cover is atrocious:

The GAF guys came up with these:



The one on the left is decent. I think the title words should be spaced apart a bit more and possibly shrunk down a bit. The one in the middle is really cool, if a bit conventional (close-ups of half a face are pretty easy ways to create an instantly intense image). The one on the far right is my favorite, because it's an image that sums up the feeling of the game, which is very open-ended and a lot of the outcome is decided by your decisions. Also, I'd be willing to bet that whoever designed that one had Carl Sagan's astronomy books in mind:


And last but certainly not least:

News Map: The Bare Essentials of Aggregated News

Allow me to present, Newsmap.

"Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media." (from Marcos Weskamp, creator of Newsmap)

Consider it a new use for Piet Mondrian's principles of design.

Personally, I can see myself using it quite often. As little time as I'm usually able to allocate to reading up on world events, I can't afford to be distracted by ads, trivial news items, or other obstacles posed by the standard design of most news sites.

The two news sources I check out the most are BBC News and The Daily Beast. The BBC is always excellent, but when I'm in a hurry, I check out the Daily Beast's "Cheat Sheet." Though sometimes, the Daily Beast can border on sensationalism.

This News Map, however, would be the perfect thing to drop in on when I need a quick fix. The heirarchy of information isn't set up by any agenda from an individual or organization. It's actually relevant. It's mathematical. I could definitely get used to this setup. I don't think it would carry too well on a large scale, though. I think people, for the most part, like their pictures right there for them to see on whatever news aggregation site they frequent. I do, too, most times, but this is just too convenient to ignore.

Musicovery.com

MUSICOVERY

I really like where this site is coming from, but its music selection is weak, the interface is awkward and the sound quality is poor. It says you can get Hi-Fi quality if you pay $4 a month, but with Pandora.com being as top-notch, intuitive, and FREE as it is, well, Musicovery might want to think about adjusting their set-up if they want to compete.


Wait a minute, what's this? Down at the bottom of Musicovery's page?

Really, Time.com? You think this is one of the 50 Best Websites of 2009? The smorgasbord of ingenuity and design prowess just flowing all over the web and you think this is one of the best?

I mean, don't get me wrong I can appreciate the creativity involved in coming up with the idea. The fact that you can pick a song by your mood (Calm to Energetic, Dark to Positive) is very cool. But it's very poorly executed from what I can see.

Time.com says:
"The interface is so radically different from Pandora and Last.fm that it seems like it was beamed from an ultra-sophisticated, über-arty future utopia."

That's a bit much. If the "uber-arty future utopia" means we get the same awkwardly placed cleavage ads on our web pages, then, I'm not too excited for the future...

Seriously, guys, look at it (not the cleavage, the webpage). The awkward blank spaces. The mismatched lettering. It's an extremely lazily designed site. All the effort obviously went into that little player and the interactive spider web of songs that appears when you choose your music.

I guess this is just an example of an idea transcending poor execution. But that doesn't mean that better execution wouldn't make it even better.

The Lets Play Archive

(from the home page of The Lets Play Archive):

A truly devoted display of games

If you're looking for game playthroughs online, you've just found the most compelling and entertaining collection. This is why we at PokerListings have decided to give our full support and thanks to everyone behind the Let's Play Archive. As we do to with all the poker online games, the Let's Play Archive focus on giving you the full experience of the games in an informative and entertaining manner. Just look at some of the great playthroughs below and you'll see what we mean. Awesome job guys!

At first glance, the whole point of The Lets Play Archive seems kind of ridiculous. People play some video games, record their entire gameplay experience via video camera or screen shots (with written or audio commentary) and then upload the files to this site, for people to come by and experience the game vicariously through them.

It's an unbelievably geeky thing to do, but that's okay, because I'm pretty damn geeky.

Gamers can drop by the site and use the playthroughs as either a guide for parts they're having trouble with, or just watch them play it. It sounds lame, but, if you're a gamer, you get it. I've just perused a few of these and the commentary they provide isn't annoying or intrusive. It's like what you and your friends would do if you were taking turns playing a single player game. You crack jokes and figure out the puzzles together. It can be a very communal experience and this site offers a little of that for you, as a spectator.

Another reason this is something to geek out over is if there is a game that you've always been curious about, but haven't had the means to play, you can see what it was like on this site.

For me, there is one game I hear great things about but probably won't ever get to experience for myself. That game is System Shock 2.

System Shock 2 and its predecessor are pretty widely known as two of the early masterpieces of computer gaming, but both of them were released at incredibly unfortunate times alongside two games that overshadowed them in popularity (Doom and Half-Life, respectively), so they got lost in the shuffle. This means that there haven't been any efforts to port the System Shock games to current hardware, which also means that unless you still have your old mid to late 90's PC, you won't be playing either of them. The creators, however, recently expanded upon the gameplay elements of System Shock with the modern classic, Bioshock, which I have played and can absolutely vouch for its reputation. So, in a way, System Shock has survived.

But I'm already planning on setting a side a couple hours one day to see the abridged version of this game. Thank you, Lets Play Archive. You crazy bunch of uber-geeks, you.

Cooking for Engineers

I consider myself a creative person, but when it comes to cooking, I require strict directions, exact quantities of time to heat or cool and exact amounts to add or not add. Without them, I become lost, confused, unsure of everything and completely useless in the kitchen. Because of this handicap of mine, along with my general impatience when it comes to preparing food (let's just eat it, already!) I never cook. At all, really. This is something about me that my girlfriend, Lori, is very keen on changing very soon.

Well, she may not have to wait long, because I have found the perfect site for someone like me. I can't believe I found it and I'm incredibly grateful that it exists. It's called Cooking for Engineers.

I'm sifting through their recipes now and I'm excited. This is so freakin' perfect. I just found a recipe for a Chocolate Pecan Pie that I may be able to cook for Lori this Christmas. Oh, she'll swoon, for sure.

Thank you, internet. Why I never asked you for cooking advice all this time, I'll never know. But I hope this is the beginning of a long and fruitful arrangement.

Assignment: The Prestige Poster, Vintage Redesign

A while back, in one of my Poster Trends articles, I mentioned that I thought the poster campaign for The Prestige really missed a great opportunity to pay homage to that late 19th Century style of magic posters. And instead came up with this:

And these, which are definitely more creative, and at least hint at the setting of the film more overtly:

Well, I ended up actually putting my money where my mouth is, so to speak, by making the posters myself using Photoshop and Illustrator. This was for a class, at first. We had to propose a redesign of something we thought was poorly designed. Initially, our final project was to actually create that redesign, so I got started on it early. But then our teacher announced that the final project assignment had been changed, so this ended up being extra credit.

I learned a hell of a lot, putting this thing together. I'll go ahead and document some of the steps that went into making it.

First, I took two of those posters from above and used the figures of the Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as reference and isolated their figures in Photoshop.

I discovered that the process is like the digital equivalent of chiseling a form into stone. I used the pen tool to create jagged shapes of different colors, then used the airbrush eraser to whittle the shapes down and fade into each other so the face looked soft and rounded.

Once I had his and Hugh Jackman's figures ready to go, I started laying everything out.





When I started making the characters for those bottom circles, I used the same technique as I had for Jackman and Bale, but tried to make it less realistic and more like the kind of sketch you would see on those old magicians posters. I didn't quite pull off the authenticity, but it definitely turned out more cartoonish than the Jackman and Bale's faces.

So I tried to keep that in mind so the style would be the same with each of the four heads. But when I got to working on Scarlett Johannsen, I got a bit carried away:

I'm really proud of how it was starting to turn out, but it's definitely too realistic for this poster. However, it's very cool to know that I'm capable of that kind of trace work at this point. When the right project comes along, whether in school or not, I now know I can pull that off. For this poster, though, this was more appropriate:

So, the final layouts went like this:





The sepia-toned version is just for kicks. I don't particularly like it without the color. Below is the latest draft of the poster. I tried to make it look old, gave it some texture and wrinkles.

I'm reasonably happy with it. It was a learning experience, first and foremost. I might tinker with a few details, but overall, I'd be happy to frame it and hang it on my wall.

In related news, I want to do another one! Here's the rough layout, so far: