Custom Cover Blu-Ray Custom Cover art thread (2 Viewers)

[Fritz Nilsen]

Hi everyone. I did this on commission for Chas, a member of this very forum, and he wanted to make it available to all. It is for a 14mm 3-disc case.

PM as usual.

 

[Charles Smith]

Fritz is extraordinarily generous with his talent, skills and his time in creating his great cover art. I felt I would be remiss in not sharing this and the Ten Commandments one above with anyone here who wishes to use them to rescue their discs from their ill-designed commercial cases and give them a proper home. I love the tablets, but the disc hubs, etc., were horribly executed. And the less said about the BTTF case, the better...though I have heard that the current release of BDs-only is a slight improvement over the original.

 

[joshEH]

Hey, could someone please make us a custom Silence of the Lambs BD cover that DOESN'T suck?
Thanks.
Signed,
- Humanity

 

[David Weicker]

Fritz,
First of all, I think you are a genius (or at the very least, a lot more patient and skilled than I am). Most of my custom covers are merely just scanned and re-sized versions of the original cases (I HATE DIGIBOOKS). I will sometimes put the original poster for the front cover if I can find a reasonably sized one online (most of the time the dpi is too small). I have got a few of your works in my collection (thank you), and I still need to PM you for your West Side Story.
I thoroughly enjoyed your discussion of how you work, and agree that the back cover is the hardest.
I do have a slight problem with your latest BTTF cover. Couldn't you have included Thomas Wilson and Mary Steenburgen in your actor's list on the front cover? While Thomas isn't as well known outside of this trilogy, and Mary was only in the third, they both were noteworthy.
Anyway, I really appreciate the work you've done, and hope that you continue to do it. Its too bad the studios don't seem to have someone as talented as you in their Blu-Ray art department.
David

 

[NY2LA]

Star Wars Series:
1. Star Wars

Excellent! Of course keeping the original poster art which is almost always a good choice. Very nice!

 

[NY2LA]

3. Return Of The Jedi

I am not a great Star Wars fan but I love those covers, and the wide choice is amazing. Any of those seems to me light years above what the studios are doing with it. Have you also designed alternate disc labels as well?

 

[NY2LA]

I'm a Superman fan from way back before I ever heard of Star Wars, so old Supes had to get a Nissen makeover as well. I'm reposting covers here that I have made a while back, so here goes:

Bravo!
I was running out of shelf space so I've been putting sequels in the same case as the original, etc. and I have several multidisc sets I have consolidated (or plan to) into fewer cases, (some had no cases to begin with) and have been toying with the idea of redoing the covers, alas my new Kodak printer prints terrible in color. Are you guys aware of the alternate cases you can get from stores like Amoeba in LA? Any kind of CD, DVD or Blu Ray case that holds single or multiple discs can be found there. All you have to do is slip in the printed cover/liner.
Do you do booklets, too?

 

[NY2LA]

This is my 2nd attempt at Rocketeer. A third one, based on the usual cover art (the one with the blue background) is coming up soon.
For this one I went the commercial route, using the teaser poster everyone wants. I don't think that particular image has ever worked on the posters I've seen, and when I recently saw the soundtrack cover it dawned on me why.
The CD, with it's square front, showed more of the "dead space" surrounding the figure. It occured to me that all the posters and covers I've seen over the years have been cropped too tightly. The figure is too angular and complex a graphic to be comfortably readable when it fills a canvas. It needs more space around it to not look too busy.
The challenge was to find a high-rez image of the poster, with all the surrounding background intact. Of course, no such image exists, so once again I had to cobble together a poster from several images. Luckily, The Rocketeer has seen a moderate resurrection the last six months, and more High-Rez scans of the posters have surfaced. I wound up extending much of the background with heavy use of the clone tool, the smudge tool (!) and various gradients using the CD inlay as a guide to how it should look. I always like to extend the front image into the spine and back, so I had to make quite a bit of image realestate up from scratch. I think the result turned out fine.
Once again, I elected not to use any art from the comics or of any prop replicas or fanmade costumes. I'm quite stubborn about that. The one exception is the insignia on the spine, by Deviant Artist J.K. Antwon. It will be on the spine of all my Rocketeer covers, I think.
To give it that old, authentic art-deco look I employed some quite heavy grain (noise) on the background, and superimposed old, weathered paper on the whole cover. Just to dirty it up a bit, like I always like to do. (I made a hold-out matte for the main figure and the rear images to occlude the paper there, so that they would stand out more.)
For the logo I reverted to the original, theatrical title treatment. It is a little spindly and hard to make readable on a busy background, so I was forced to revert to drop shadows to really make it stand out. I gave the letters a metallic texture, as it seemed quite appropriate. To everyone's relief, I included the "The" this time
The back warranted another art-deco theme. I found some lineart of an art-deco pattern via Google, and recreated parts of it using the pen tool and stroking with a 5 pixel brown line. I overlaid a pressed aluminium texture which isn't really historically appropriate, but it brought the whole element to life. Lastly I applied a 2-pixel black glow to frame it against the background.
The art-deco pattern gave me some natural shapes for the images and text that tied the whole thing together. The circles with faces was an afterthought, when I decided I wanted to feature more of the players from the movie. All those faces are screengrabs from a 720p HDTV capture I have laying around. They're not properly posed photographs, but they'll do. (I would like to have access to screengrabs for every project I do, that way I'm not reliant upon just what a still-photographer happened to capture way back when.) You'll excuse the use of a major spoiler image (also a direct frame grab), but I thought it was the perfect image to make the film seem action-filled and exciting.
Re: the strict layout of the back, I'm generally a disciple of the golden rule of composition, but with an art-deco layout the complete centering of everything is quite legitimate. Symmetry can't really be avoided when evoking this style.
If ever a cover called out for a black Blu-Ray case this is it. My heart just sank when I created a preview with that blue monstrosity. One could see it as a design challenge, to make the coverart work with the blue border, but I can guarantee you no designer was involved when "they" decided to go blue for all cases. May "they" rot in hell.
Sorry.
Anyway, much to my delight, Disney released the official specs only yesterday, so I could include accurate info on the release. The rumours indicate it will be a barebones release, so I made no accomodation for special features in my layout. If that changes, I'll have to rethink the back a bit. (For once I find myself wishing for a barebones release )
That's it. Another cover under my belt. Hope everyone loves The Rocketeer as much as I do. True fans may PM me for a High Rez copy of this.

Wow. A masterpiece. Studios should be using you guys instead of the high-school art-class working with a couple stills and cheap fonts I see on so many titles.

 

[NY2LA]

That Ben Hur is just too cool. I love the, what, 1800's flavor it has. I'd like to see someone do a marketing study and compare the studio cover art with the custom cover art found her and elsewhere on the internet. I know if I'm just walking by the display, this Ben Hur cover is going to catch my eye and make me want to buy it.
That art wouldn't look out of place on the cover of the book when it was originally published, I'm thinking. And it still works today.

Fingers crossed....
Disney, are you seeing this? If we can get The Rocketeer, there's hope for this, right

I want one for Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Happpiest Millionaire using the original artwork... Dis switched Bedknobs from classy (album cover) to cheesy (ads and posters) artwork before they even released it.

 

[NY2LA]

Obviously, I came to this thread late, but WOW. What artistry. What creativity. What expertise. What is wrong with the studios?
I've long thought there could be a cottage industry for people creating alternate packaging design, especially if you did booklets and have access to different cases and such. I cannot encourage you guys enough!

 

[Jeff Whitford]

*

 

[Jeff Whitford]

Does anyone have a cover for the original Assault on Precinct 13

How about a scan of the available one . Email me .

 

[Fritz Nilsen]

This is what I refer to as a "simple custom" commission from my middle price bracket.
The client wanted to share this with all of you, so you are free to PM me for download.

 

[Fritz Nilsen]

A recent cover commission for Saturday Night Fever. The client asked me to share this freely, so PMs are welcome.

 

[TonyD]

Fritz have you considered consolidating all the cover shots into one post, maybe the first one in alphabetical order for easy window browsing?

 

[Fritz Nilsen]

Originally Posted by TonyD /t/314247/blu-ray-custom-cover-art-thread/120#post_3912750
Fritz have you considered consolidating all the cover shots into one post, maybe the first one in alphabetical order for easy window browsing?

Actually haven't thought about it, but it's not a bad idea. However, I don't want people to think this is MY thread. My intention with this thread was to provide a platform for any cover-cobblers lurking about (but apart from Mike and myself it's very quiet in here). One option would be to make an index of the covers in the first post, but that's just too much work to maintain.

For now, people will just have to look in from time to time. It's not like this thread is frequently updated

 

[Fritz Nilsen]

Here's my take on Misery.
Special thanks to Rybev.

Available by PM and soon to be found on CustoManiacs.

 

[Mike Wadkins]

Long time away from me, my PC died and I lost a lot of stuff.
My first WIP in a long time, bit of a block on the back, keep the cut out of just go for a semi normal back??

 

[Fritz Nilsen]

My second attempt at a Chaplin Blu-ray Custom Cover:

Inspired by another cover artist's Criterion custom for Chaplin, I decided to give this one another go. I made a custom for Chaplin last year using the silhouette poster art, but I like this new poster so much better.
It's been a while since I did a full write-up for one of my covers, but here goes:
The Front:
As always, the hunt for high-rez images for older movies is hit-and miss. In the end I asked the other artist if he would send me the poster image he had used. It was still fairly small, but it was something I could work with.
First I upscaled it to about twice the final size, then started overlaying some grain to camouflage the low level of detail. I create the grain effect by making a separate layer of 40% grey, then add some uniform noise to it. I use a brush-stroke filter called "Spatter" on that noise to clump it up and make it look like actual filmgrain. Then I set the grain layer to the Overlay blending mode and can dial it in and out using the Opacity slider. For this image I used two layers with different coarseness of grain. The finer grain was over Downey's facial features and the rest of the image has gradually coarser grain out towards the edges.
I also overlaid an image of a blank, sepia-toned photograph, with just a little bit of vignetting along the edges. This gave the low-rez image a patina of age and wear, something which was appropriate for the material.
I opted to recreate the tagline and title treatment from the original image almost exactly. One should usually replace all scanned text with actual type anyway, to ensure it is crisp and clean. First I had to clone-brush out the existing text, which was easy as it was placed in the black of the bowler hat. Phew! When trying to find a matching font for replacement, I find it useful to type up the text in a text layer, then highlight the font selector window and use the arrow keys to cycle through the fonts I have on my computer. The active type layer changes as I flip through the fonts, so that I see the results immediately. I have just about 900 fonts on my system, so it sometimes takes a while to cycle throught them all, but more often than not I can get a 90% match with what I have pre-installed.

The Spine:
As always I carry over the title treatment from the front to the spine. I also like to use the "official" logo and layout for the studios to make my customs blend in with the retail covers on the shelf.
I read a comment on one of these forums once, that spine images are always ugly, but I beg to differ. The only fancy thing I did with the Chaplin image on the spine was add a slight drop-shadow to it so his feet would seem tied to the "ground".
The Back:
As I said, I had done a Chaplin cover previously, so I had the synopsis and the extras list already typed out. This time I added the credits block and retyped all the legal text as well, which I hadn't bothered to do last time.
I always type up every bit of text before I start to experiment with the images and layout. This way I know almost exactly how many elements I have to incorporate and roughly how much space is available for images. I can always take out an image or two, but leaving out the synopsis or the list of extras to accomodate an image is not an option for me.
I also like to have some texture to my covers, and continue the look of the fronts over into the backs. Here I just had to extend the grain/sepia treatment I had applied to the front poster and it made for a nice background.
The backs are hard, so it always helps me to latch onto a particular art style or theme to get me started. I was going for a Art Noveau vibe to fit the time period, and that dictated much of the layout. I tend to do strictly symmetrical layouts as a rule, but have been trying to break away from it. For this, however, a symmetrical, elegant approach seemed the best fit.
To keep in line with the theme of the source material, I used a font called Silentia to mimic the title cards of silent movies. This turned out to be a beautiful and versatile font, and I wound up using it for all the text on the back. Usually I find that what works for the synopsis doesn't fit the extras-list, but Silentia worked for everything, even the credit block.
The layout of the back took me all day, roughly 7 hours. The one I ended up with was my third version. I originally did some work on using a wavy film strip as a basis to build the layout around, but I wasn't satisfied with the result. It looked too gimmicky and worked against the symmetry I wanted. My second attempt had some busy, ornamental linework going into thick borders around the images, but it just got too cluttered and clunky. In the end I just kept the top portion of that element (the rings you see behind Downey's back) and made simple, horizontal dividers between the different elements.
I knew I wanted a medium close-up of Downey in character as the tramp for the top of the cover. However, all the images I found were of a morose, sad clown type Chaplin. That's part of the film, to be sure, but I wanted a lighter, more inviting tone to the cover. (The front poster was already serious enough.) I eventually found the image of Chaplin with the rose, which I thought was a perfect fit tonally. Again, only smallish images were to be found, so I had to do an upscaled/noise-reduced/grained-up job on that image as well. Downey's shoulders were cut off at the collar bone, so I had to do some extensions by copying other parts of the image and clone-stamping on top of that. Why can't things ever be easy? The colours of the original image were rather dull, so I tweaked them a bit. I masked out the rose to give it a particular saturation boost. The rose is the only really bright element on the entire cover, so the eye goes straight to it and it cheers up the general mood of the piece. The image still looks like a colorized b&w image, but it fits with the material.
When selecting screenshots I try to represent as many different settings or characters from the movie as possible. Considering these will be stamp-sized once they're printed, the facial close-ups tend to dominate. The lovely Milla Jovovich was my choice to represent the sexual content of the film.
Finally, I put an orange overlay over the entire cover at about 20% opacity to give it a warmer hue. This also accentuated the brown sepia tone, which I had suppressed too much originally.
There it is, the process behind this cover. It was a nice change to do a cover for myself after a string of commissions. These personal projects tend to perculate in the back of my brain, and when a little free time crops up they come to the surface.
I'm uploading it to Customaniacs, but will accept PMs through this forum as well.

 

[RickER]

Let me just say again...you guys do some great work! Thanks for all the time and hard work!