Back in April I started working on another packaging project for The Criterion Collection. This time it was for the Guy Maddin film “Brand Upon The Brain!” It was a lot of fun and, as usual, everyone at The Criterion Collection was great to work with.

If you’re not familiar with Guy Maddin’s work, do check it out. He’s an amazing film-maker. His work is often sad and funny and twisted and beautiful all at once. “Brand Upon The Brain” is definitely all of those things. The film is based, in part, on Guy’s imagined childhood. In the film, young Guy Maddin grows up in a lighthouse that is also an orphanage which is ran by his overly strict and verbally abusive mother. She sits at the top of the lighthouse and watches everything the children do. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say that things get strange and complicated. Needless to say, innocence is lost!

Here’s the trailer:

The story begins with grown-up Guy putting a fresh coat of white paint on the lighthouse, so we took that as inspiration for the type treatment, which I hand painted with India Ink. From there we represented the lighthouse by cutting out pieces of construction paper and creating a lighthouse-like composition. We wanted to make it personal and reference the children in the story, so the hand-made approach seemed right.

We added in images of 3 of the main characters and represented the mother as the all-knowing eye perched atop the lighthouse. Around the radiating beams we hand wrote phrases which appear in the film. The hand-written technique references the letter that grown-up Guy Maddin reads at the offset of the film.

For the inside booklet I used the same hand-painted type style but did it over some Polaroids that I took of the film while watching it on my TV. This gave me some new images to work with that had that nice, blurry, film-like quality, which seemed consistent with Guy’s technique.

Booklet Cover – Open and Flat

Inside Back Cover Spread

For the DVD Menus we basically took the cover concept a little further and built menu pages out of some of the cover elements, creating new illustrations when needed. When Guy first released the film, many of the screenings were accompanied by live narration. We referenced that performance aspect by making the menus somewhat reminiscent of theatrical productions.

All in all it was a great project to work on and everyone, including Guy Maddin, was happy with the results. If you’re interested in obtaining a copy, you can purchase the film here. Onward!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Design, Film, Typography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.