Empire of the Sun soundtrack CD
La-La Land Records, 2014
Based on J. G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, Empire of the Sun (1987) is a high water mark in Steven Spielberg's filmography, depicting an English boy's childhood as it's irrevocably lost behind the walls of Japanese prison camp during the second world war. While underappreciated by critics in 1987, the film has grown considerably in reputation and stature over the years. So too has the film's score by longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams, which is as alternately magical and devastating as the film it accompanies.
Much of the music from the film was released in album form on both LP and cassette at the time of the film's release. This being the mid-'80s, the early days of the then-new "compact disc" format, it was likewise released on CD. However, the original 1987 album had been targeted by film music fans as being long overdue for an expanded reissue, ideally one featuring alternate recordings and any music previously unavailable. As always, La-La Land Records was happy to oblige and produced this expanded edition in 2014.
The archives at Warner Bros had provided me with several fine stills from the film. However, the original key art for the theatrical poster appeared to have been cropped accidnetally and the scan showed signs of light reflecting through the scanner bed, distorting some of the fine detail in John Alvin's painting.
Hoping to find a better source for the poster, I began looking elsewhere, noting several slight variations between foreign posters, a paperback tie-in edition of Ballard's novel, and other items such as press kit folders. Interestingly, he UK quad poster used the artwork in a more horizontal format (shown far right in the inset below), allowing the silhouette of the boy to run with his toy Zero plane across a much wider barbed-wire landscape, proportions that would be more favorable to the square format of a CD cover.
As luck would have it, one of the expanded edition's producers had the very same UK quad in his personal collection of memorabilia from the film. Rather than risk shipping a valuable poster for me to photograph, I asked him to take several snapshots of just the silhouette along the bottom of the poster, which I then stitched together...
... in Photoshop, combining and retouching parts of the photos as needed to recreate the same, wider silhouetted foreground elements.
From the very beginning of the project, I was really hoping to find an image of Jim's toy Japanese fighter plane for the back tray card (final art shown above), but no such photo seemed to exist.
However, I was able to take frame-by-frame stills of the scene when Jim drops the toy during the rush to escape Shanghai and is separated from his parents. In most of that second or two of footage, the plane is obscured by the feet of the crowd (1 and 3 below) and the only shot where it wasn't (2), the plane itself is wobbling and out of focus.
By stitching all three together, and extending the asphalt above and below the plane for a more natural and pleasing portrait of the signature toy, I had my shot. I also went a little further and slightly re-graded the shot to better match the warmer tones of the theatrical keyart, which was used on both the cover itself and the CD spines.
The strands of barbed wire in the foreground were added in post, but the rest of this product photo (including a toy Zero plane purchased on eBay) was shot in the dugout of a nearby softball field!
