Shane soundtrack CD
La-La Land Records, 2013
One of the pleasures for me in designing for soundtrack labels is the music itself is closely tied to a medium I love in all its shapes and genres: Film. A new CD project provides either a good excuse to revisit a film after many long years or it gives me a reason to discover a new one.
1953's Shane is widely considered a masterpiece, marking a real turning point in how violence was depicted in the Hollywood Western, yet, despite my having a dad who arguably lives and breathes old cowboy flicks, I had somehow never seen it. Then this project arrived, less like Alan Ladd riding out of the mountains of Wyoming and more like a "Hey, Jim, you're doing Shane next" email blipping up in my inbox. But I made the effort to sit down and finally watch it and Shane is indeed one classic that lives up to its rep.
The original theatrical poster for Shane (above left) was strikingly violent for the era and surprisingly colorful. So much so that, having already worked on a number of projects for films of the 1950s, my first assumption was that it had to be a foreign poster. At that time, many foreign posters—particularly those from Belgium and France—were so much more interesting than their Hollywood counterparts. But, shockingly, it was indeed the US one sheet. Kudos, mid-50s studio marketing staff!
As is often the case though, the poster was far from a natural fit for a CD cover. Fitting the artwork within the square proportions of a CD booklet cover, meant cutting it apart and reassembling the pieces (above right), as well as retouching fill-ins to any areas of the mountaintop and clouds of smoke that had been obscured by type in the original layout.
For the liner notes, the Paramount archives had preserved a lot of photos, primarily in black and white (This despite the film having been shot in Technicolor. No doubt B&W film was cheaper in the mid-50s and was arguably more useful to marketing departments relying on coverage in newspapers and limited-color magazines to help promote their films).
In order to help the black and white photos fit more harmoniously with the new CD cover, I gave them a similar tint as the ink wash figures on the film's poster and retained the same bold color palette and handdrawn typography throughout the booklet design.
