After all the success Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross had with their past efforts, it’s really interesting to hear only Ross’ side of the coin. To be able to go back to a time before the duo started collaborating on soundtracks. The Book of Eli shows very clearly, that all the elements of his later work were already present, albeit not in the same well-elaborated form.
My goal for this cover series was to provide the same quality design for Atticus Ross’ solo work, as I did before for The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. I wanted to give the soundtrack the feel of a stand-alone record. To enhance it a bit and take away the image of a regular score album.
This series starts off with a true Photoshop work of mine (#1), one of the very few I have ever done so far. With this image as a base, I first extended the two bridges and replaced the whole background sky. Then I slightly repositioned the poor bastard on the left. Together with Denzel Washington’s character in the center and the slanted road sign on the right it now creates a symmetrical balance on the X-axis.
After some colour and contrast corrections, I was ready to apply my customized film logo and some additional text. In order to keep the top half light and airy, I went with a rather unimposing font style (“Byron” and “IM Fell“) and a very small textsize.
The directors laid great emphasis on having a good part of the camera frame filled with clouds and sky texture. And just like in the film, the sky plays a crucial role in my custom covers as well (#1 to #3). Only for my last cover (#4) I chose another form of biblical reference. Because you can’t have a custom cover series for The Book of Eli and don’t have a book-like cover in it.
The gallery above presents a few more traditional variations (#6, #7) of the original artwork (#5). I struggled with them for way longer than my first four custom covers, which is odd, considering the almost official design template. But I’ve created numerous layout concepts, none of which satisfied fully. The three customs above represent my least failed attempts.
HQCovers 