Take A Hard Ride soundtrack CD
Client: La-La Land Records, 2015
Fantastic poster art, no photos. That was basically the situation during the design of this CD of composer Jerry Goldsmith's score to the 1977 blaxploitation spaghetti western Take A Hard Ride, which starred all-time NFL great Jim Brown and Fred Williamson as an unlikely pair of heroes trying to fend off the villainous harmonica of Lee Van Cleef.
above: A pair of unused cover layouts.
A search through Fox archives yielded four photos from the film, nowhere near enough to go ‘round, meaning the design would need to rely heavily on screen captures from home video. Thankfully, this somewhat forgotten western had been given an HD blu-ray release. And while even 1080p freeze-frames wouldn’t enlarge well to full-page size in a CD booklet, a more graphic, illustrative approach to what freeze-frames I could pull from the blu-ray would fit nicely with the style of the film. These newly treated images shown below were more like illustrations than screen captures, and as such could be used larger and more dominantly in the layout.
above: While the blu-ray transfer was quite good, the HD screen captures still looked pretty soft when enlarged. Treated in Photoshop to a barrage of filters and manipulation, and then mixed with hand drawn elements and painted textures, they became much more flexible elements for page design.
above: In order to make a clean, readable space for the listing of track titles and times, I cut out and removed the two men, moving them closer together and replacing the background with a similar landscape.
