I’m excited to blog this post as it’s been a long time in the making.  So you’ll have to excuse the novel about to ensue…

You may remember me blogging some of the process photos for the making of On Ensemble’s music video Yamasong here, here, and here.  Oddly enough, I don’t even know where to start talking about this design.  It’s been through lots of iterations, edits, and versions under director,  Sam K. Hale’s art direction so there’s a lot on the cutting room floor that in itself could probably make for a fun post.  But I guess for now I’ll start on the final design .

The overall concept was to mimic the aesthetic of the film going from dark to light, just like Nani’s journey going from being asleep to waking up and entering into her alternate reality.  So the cover is a darker scheme (like the beginning of the film) and when you open up the case, the lighter/warmer tones on the disc are more like the dreamworld.  Note: You’ll have to watch the film to know what the hell any of that just meant.

For the cover there are two main elements; 1.) the bird’s eye view (from the film) of Nani looking down into the milky-blue cauldron and 2.) the hand made ‘Yamasong’ title treatment. The shot of Nani is from screen capture of the film – the problem was only half the cauldron was visible in the shot  so I had to clone and retouch the remainder of the cauldron in.  Next was the type: I hand-drew the letters, traced them onto tracing paper, then scanned it into Illustrator to “clean it up.” Actually it was more of a ‘dirty-it-up’ job as I wanted to match the organic hand-crafted approach of the film.  Once the typography was looking nice, I brought it into Photoshop and applied used various textures, effects, adjustment layers, masks, and painting to help it stand out from the background.

The other main elements that we incorporated were the ‘gnarly tree,’ as Sam dubbed it, and the Mountain (”Yama”) both of which were reduced down to 3-color illustrations and juxtaposed to create a sort of Yin-Yang effect.   Anyways, this was probably more detail than anybody really cared to know; but, it’s fun to look back on this project which has been more than a year in the making.