Part three of my Jurassic Park series closes with Don Davis’ soundtrack album to the rather failed third film directed by Joe Johnston. At least the score gave us some lovely new themes and a few good atmosphere tracks. But all in all the whole affair was a bit lackluster. This has continued up to the soundtrack cover with its excessive use of a Pteranodon’s shadow. I mean, It’s totally okay to use shadows, but that top layer was far too heavy. But to be fair, I quiet liked the metal surface texture, even though I couldn’t see any connection to the film. I guess Universal just wanted to walk the design path that was established by The Lost World four years earlier. Or someone at the agency just thought it looked cool, or, I don’t know… whatever.
Because of that said shadow on the original artwork I fairly early decided to remake the entire thing. Even if it’s just about to make the shadow more subtle (which I kinda did), but it was totally worth it (#1).
An alternate version without any shadows at all turned out to be far more difficult than expected (#2). The lack of high-quality source material made it necessary to piece together the metal texture background out of different individual images. And the JP III logo on top wasn’t available with light background, which meant I couldn’t just blend it in with the metal texture, but had to redraw all the edges first and then put a dark layer underneath to get enough contrast to the background layer. It took even more effort than the bumpy wording of that sentence just now. If you’ve read so far, I’m sure you can experience my troubles.
To recover from my exertions, I composed a fully black cover variation that serves as an homage to the original Jurassic Park artwork (#3), complete with identical font style and album credits.
I couldn’t find that much usefull key art for this film, that’s why I have to keep this entry short and sweet. I only managed to come up with two additional customs, based on the one hand upon on the recently released 3D Blu-Ray cover (#4) and on the other upon the Jurassic Park Trilogy DVD Collection (#5). The first one was a real quickie, but the second one took me a while. It was once again assembled from various different pieces and I’m afraid one can see the development stages this one went through. The quality is in no way compared to the provided effort. But – and thus the circle is closed – you could say the same about the film, couldn’t you?
HQCovers 