Sunday 16 October 2011

On speed-reading movies

ds106 assignment on creating a film-based book cover. Inspired by a previous submission.


Speed Racer, by the Wachowski Brothers is actually one of my favourite movies, although I don't think such sentiment is in line with the majority opinion. Nevertheless this was a good chance to promote the movie and subliminally get others to watch it too (I mean..).

When considering the key elements to this assignment what I picked up on were the simplified designs and "tattered" treatment of the "book". I sought to achieve the design goal by focusing on the element of speed, hence the speedometer, while providing the meticulous viewer with "easter eggs" in the way of the "5" (an allusion to the protagonist's car, the Mach 5), as well as the infinity symbol which aims to represent the intense speeds and stereotypical ideals of right and wrong that are considered in the course of the movie.

As for the tattered treatment, I used a mix of brush textures in Photoshop, as well as a texture layer obtained from an image I found while searching Google images for "old paper textures".

UPDATE: Video tutorial for creating texture effects in Photoshop via brushes/eraser and texture image layers added below, on suggestion by redbaiters.

Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

Do note that to fit the video in this blog-space I had to reduce the size quite a bit so head over to this link to see it in full-view. Also, apologies for the annoying "hair dryer" noise in the background. That was my laptop's fan asserting its presence. :s

4 comments:

  1. You have no idea how valuable a screencast tutorial of using the textures to create the tattered effect would be for me. I have been dying to do this assignment, but can;t get my stuff to look this good. You nailed this assignment, the aesthetic was awesome enough, but the Easter Eggs make this brilliant. If you have never done a screencast before it is easy, just check out Jing---it's free! http://www.techsmith.com/jing/

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  2. Thanks a lot for the screencast suggestion. I looked into it and it's a really interesting tool that I'll be using more int he future I think.

    That said, I managed to do a screencast (rough around the edges, but..) illustrating the texture methods I used for the image here. Hope it helps!

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  3. Hey, thanks! Like Redbaiter, I have been trying to do this and couldn't quite get my texture right. I really appreciate you took the time to do the tutorial! Awesome!

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