The key art created for the 1956 MGM film "Forbidden Planet" DVD booklet. It required color correcting and putting in a new background.
FORBIDDEN PLANET
Key art image composition and design. Created for the classic sci-fi film "Forbidden Planet" DVD insert booklet and packaging.
I was responsible for the image composition, design and illustration work of the DVD cover packaging as well as the insert booklet. The client was MGM/UA Studios.
The artwork for this particular DVD title was "stylized" not only as a design consideration but a solution to a production problem this particular movie title had from the outset. MGM had next to nothing in their archives that was suitable to use in the design of this insert booklet. Most of the 8 x 10 shots they had were posed black & white publicity photos, and the few color images were 35mm slides of such poor quality that a decent scan could not
be obtained.
The design solution was to create highly-stylized art deco influenced artwork that captured the feel of early space opera science-fiction films of the era. To create the sketched artwork in a speedy and cost-effective manner it was decided that working digitally with the existing electronic scans was the best approach.
The example used to illustrate the process is a detail section of the back cover. This piece is chosen as an example because it started out as one of the few quality black and white 8 x 10s available.
Click on the image to the left for
the step-by-step process of creating
the stylized artwork for the
“Forbidden Planet” DVD insert booklet.
The example used to illustrate the process is a detail section of the back cover. The last step (not shown) was to help the type in the layout file to stand out clearly and be legible against the artwork. This was done by taking the layout file form QuarkXPress and ripping a postscript file of the composed type. This postscript file could then be rasterized into Photoshop. Once in Photoshop this “type” layer was blurred and used to subtly ghost back the image to the overall warm gray of the background art. This vastly improved the readability of the live type that would be imaged from the married layout from within the layout application.