Congrats to Alejandro González Iñárritu for winning big time at last nights Oscars. He’s definitely among my favourite directors and I salute to his skill and creativity. I love his body of work ever since 21 Grams and it’s about time he gets his well-deserved recognition.
The highly unusual drum score for Birdman has been “composed” (or rather improvised) by Jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez and is definitely worth a listen. It’s really fascinating how Sanchez is able to create moods and tensions only with the sounds of a drumset.
My first custom (#1) is based on the fantastic one-sheet poster, designed by Mark W. Carroll and photographed by Iñárritu himself. I really struggled to turn this one into a square ratio album cover. I had to combine different posters and flyers with resolutions all over the place and even edited in the missing areas by hand. In return I was able to place the title logo and the album credits in the same spot as they are in the poster. I love all these little details in this one, such as the cast and crew credits stylized as billboard signs or the title character high above the street. The black/white gives it the extra special touch. Please click here for an alternate angle and a slightly different design.
The other one worth mentioning is cover #3, which utilizes the flash animation from the official website. I had to literally screengrab images over images until I finally hit the right spot. This one would make a nice disc label as well.
The gallery below consists of variations of the original album artwork (#4). I used the international cities poster campaign for reference, partly because the handdrawn graphics style is very reminiscent to the original cover and also because seeing the Birdman as he’s busy following the full moon around the globe only to pose in front of it in a manly manner is just too good not to be used.
The album credits were recreated using “Helvetica”, a fairly easy job. The hardest part to be honest, was identifying all of these iconic landmarks! I’m not an expert and especially the eastern stuff was quite difficult to match. Take a guess for yourself or click on any cover above to open the carousel view. You can find descriptions of all the locations in each cover’s liner notes. Either way, please enjoy!
Birdman isn’t exactly a crowdpuller. Even though the film won multiple awards round about, the drumscore is hard to swallow at times. To draw attention to this custom covers set through social media, I came up with a special advertising banner. You can check it out below:
HQCovers 
[…] time to time I come up with special advertising graphics to help promoting my custom covers on various […]
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