I have adjusted this ds106 assignment from ‘I can read movies’ to ‘We can read movies’ as we are planning to do a few as a family – lots of ideas rolling in…

The first series is the Hitchcock series. Just 4 to start with…

bookcover bookcover

bookcover bookcover

For this assignment I used Adobe CS InDesign which I’ve had for a while but not used. This gave me a chance to use it. I didn’t need to find any tutorials as it was fairly straightforward to use as I am very familiar with photoshop.

I started by making the basic book design for the we can read movies series. I then tried to establish a feel for the Hitchcock series, which needs a feeling of suspense… I followed some hints from Cheryls blog post about design – using the triangles, the diagonals and the dark background. I used one graphic for the series to pull them together. This was actually a photo of a tube station and I think the diagonal lines of light establish tension too.

It was really hard with Hitchcock to not go with the obvious but what I wanted to do was use my own photos where possible and to add effects in Photoshop to make them more like a graphic. I used the artistic filters cutout in the main and it was interesting playing with that. Very hard not to use birds for The birds and I tried not to but found a photo taken on hols where we a roof was covered. This is probably one of my favourites as I worked the rooftop to align with the triangle edge. I had to use someone else’s photo (thank you baileyclark for using a CC licence)  for Shadow of a doubt as I wanted to use an emerald ring and don’t have one. The ring is central to the story, highlighting the tension between the relationship of Charlie and her uncle and also being a crucial clue to his involvement in the murders. I tried to have one colour in each main photo so that I could colour pick it for the title text.

It took blooming ages but now we are planning a film noir series, possibly a sci fic series, and I would like to do more hitch ones.  It takes alot of time but has stimulated some great conversations in the family about what key image/icon could be used to convey a film and has made me re-discover some of my old images and play around with them…

I love ds106 for this assignment alone. Even though i have fallen behind on the visual and design assignments and have only just started thinking about audio assignments – we will definitely be continuing to work through the whole summer of oblivion.