DesignAssignments55 – Assignment Bank

13. i can read movies (ds106 #4)

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Create a film-based book cover using the aesthetic framed by Spacesick

Now, this isn’t nearly as minimalist and thought out as the original ‘I Can Read Movies’ image series by Spacesick, but I figured I’d give my own spin on it. I did a few tests where I tried to do something closer to the originals, much flatter in terms of design, but it wasn’t really working for me.

So the movie that I chose is called ‘The One Million Yen Girl’ (also known as ‘One Million Yen Girl’, ‘???????’), a Japanese movie that I really love. The movie revolves around a 21 year old girl, played by Aoi Yuu who travels from town to town in Japan, staying only for as long as it takes her to earn one million yen.

For the book cover, I decided to use a picture of Aoi Yuu, found here through the powers of Google. With the photo as a base, I looked through textures I had saved on my laptop for something that had a retro/sixties feel that would help to give the cover an old school feel like the original ones (despite being different.) To achieve this I used two textures from Claws&Fangs (from this and this texture pack). I decided to use the flower like red texture as the main design point of the cover, and resized and erased parts of the image of Aoi to fit within the flower-y part. On top of that I used an old paper stock image by ofruin-stock, set it to Multiply opacity:45% to give it an older look. Along with that I added a C&F red striped texture, Softlight opacity:66%, and a dotted black/white texture (think Roy Lichtenstein) at Softlight opacity:44%, for more of the retro feel. Lastly I added text and some details like the color border and box, plus a black gradient at Softlight to give some shadow on the left side. The text is written in black font and placed underneath the texture layers, so that they have a similar old look.

So it ended up looking quite different, but overall I’m pleased with it. Might add some more text details to make it look more similar to the originals…!

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I Can Read Alien

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One of the assignments I have been dying to do for over a year, but have never been brave enough to try is the I Can Read Movies design assignment. My first attempt at this assignment is rather derivative, I stole the design idea from Spacesick, the orginator of this awesome series. I took the basic design for his Gremlins book cover, and applied it to one of my all-time favorite films Alien (1979).

So basically I imagined a series of rows of alien incubator pods that end in a fullblown face hugging alien. What’s always been interesting to me is that in the original movie poster the alien pod serves as the dominant image. It is a rather minimalistic poster in its own right, and the fact that the pod in all subsequent sequels is relegated to insignificance, when for me it was one of the most powerful images of the first, and best, film is interesting. I understand the original movie poster didn’t want to give the alien’s form away, a form that would thereafter become iconic. But as much as James Cameron tried in Aliens, the feel and aesthetic of the first half an hour of the first film has never been reproduced convincingly. It’s as masterful as set design has ever gotten.

Anyway, this book cover is certainly not that masterful either but it does pay homage to the pod garden, what’s more it gives the facehugger some love. I also built in at least one easter egg wherein the film’s original tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream” is re-worked for the novel. I also made it a bavabooks production with the same year the film was released. Simple, I know, but this is my first go around with actually trying to do much more than map some text on an image, so gimme a break.

I am gonna do a fullblown tutorial for my work on this, but I have to give a shout-out to MOME, his tutroial on using brushes allowed me to begin adding some texture and making this look a bit more convincing. It was cool to learn a bit more about textures, and I am getting more and more familiar with GIMP, which is nice.

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I Can Read Movies

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Submitted by: Jim Groom

_cokwr: Create a film-based book cover using the aesthetic framed by Spacesick here: http://spacesick.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-can-read-movies-series.html See the original images here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacesick/sets/72157614482499746/with/3198823976/ , _cpzh4: Design, _cre1l: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3388/3276447572_ba2af80e03_m.jpg, _chk2m: Jim Groom, _ciyn3: 55, _ckd7g: DesignAssignments55, _clrrx: DesignAssignments, _cztg3: DesignTutorials55

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On speed-reading movies

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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.

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

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I Can Read "Letters from Iwo Jima"

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This is for Digital Storytelling.
The Assignment name is I Can Read Moveis.

I picked up one of my favorite movie which is Letters from Iwo Jima.
This movie portrays the Battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers.

Usually, I really do not like war movie even though I am Japanese.

However, this is my favorite movie because music and story are quite beautiful.

i put here an example of the sound from this film.

If you listen to this sound, you understand how this film has such a beautiful music!!

Story is also beautiful, If you are non-Japanese, please see this film because this film described one of the Japanese characteristic.
I usually do not cry for movie, but this is the only one which I cried.

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I can read American Beauty

Here’s my take on the #ds106 “I Can Read Movies” design assignment. I tried to riff off of the work and aesthetic of spacesick as instructed in the assignment, and to me that meant bring in a simple pattern and iconic image from the film. There are so many iconic images in this film I think I could do all four visual assignments just making different book covers for America Beauty.

To do this one, I found the scene of the paper bag blowing in the wind on YouTube and made a still image. I pasted that into Illustrator and traced the outline of the paper bag using the pen tool. I made a large black rectangle for the background. Then I searched for and downloaded a simple free vector brick pattern and brought it into Illustrator and changed the colors. I could have drawn the bricks by hand but this was faster, and I need to go fast today. I used Adobe Garamond Pro in bold for the movie title and Helvetica Neue for everything else. I recreated the little projector graphic from simple shapes (ellipse, rectangle, polygon). Here’s how it looked when I finished in Illustrator.

Here’s an illustrator tip: if you want to draw a triangle use the star or polygon shape tool. Click and drag to begin drawing your shape, and while holding down the mouse button press the down arrow on your keyboard to reduce the number of star points or polygon sides to 3. Tada. Triangle. If you don’t like the triangle shape you get, use the direct select tool (white arrow) to move the corner points to reshape your triangle.

From Illustrator I saved a .png file and opened it in Photoshop. I downloaded Paper Texture 1 by pareeerica and placed that on a layer above my book cover and set its layer blending mode to Multiply to get the paper texture onto the book surface. Then I used the burn tool with a large feathered brush on the book cover layer to darken the edges a bit.

If I had more time today I would have introduced more wear and tear to the cover. But unfortunately it’s time to put most of my tech away and pack it into a bag to carry to England. I start teaching a digital storytelling class on July 4, but I leave on July 1 and there is a lot of stuff I need to do before I leave. I’m afraid my #ds106 participation will have to diminish over the next few days while I’m in transit, but I’ll be joining in as much as possible once I settle in to my temporary home in Nottingham, England.

Bourne: I Can Read Movies

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This is last project that I was able to get done this weekend. I am not an illustrator by any means. Believe it or not my favorite, and most comfortable, program to draw and illustrate in is Keynote. I know Keynote is meant for PowerPoint equivalent presentations, but it is very easy to create drawings with it. I illustrated the Bourne Identity book cover using Keynote ’08.

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I Can Read Movies: Harry Potter

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I used to love to read, and Penguin books were the best. After I made this cover, I decided I needed to scuff it up a bit and make it look old. This kind of makes me want to print these out and wrap them over some of the actual busy covers of the books I own.