The Midnight Movie Society was formed by Jake Rudh (DJ at Transmission) and Vita.MN (the weekly magazine of the Minneapolis Star Tribune). Apparently they had a graphic designer but didn't like the direction so they tapped me. Me! The Star Tribune is the biggest Newspaper in the midwest, and there are hundreds of designers in the city, and I got a personal call. It's not such a bad thing.
But, about the work. I was given about 24 hours to complete this. Probably the first time I've had such a strict deadline. Luckily, I know a lot about the movie Clue. But it was hard as hell to come up with a concept. The only piece of art direction I got really was to base it off the Original Movie Poster. And, as it turns out, I love colored lines. There really wasn't much to go off of in the way of stock images, and I WAS getting paid for this, so I knew I had to create my own art. I went about tediously tracing lo-res stock images. I wasn't worried about perfection because where do I take inspiration from? The 60s. And what is so great about 60s illustration? It's imperfect and non-complex. Next, the lines. At first they were going every-which-way and when I submitted it there was a suggestion to make them all lead to the title, and possibly with little weapons on them. I originally thought about doing something with the weapons, but then I didn't. Anyway, with about 30 minutes to the deadline, and with a rapidly dying computer battery, I was lucky to find an illustration online of the Clue weapons and I did a livetrace in Illustrator. This is the finished product. I'm proud of it, but at the same time, sick of looking at it. It was published in several issues of vita.mn and I got a nice little sum; my first paid gig! It was a very hard, very stressful project. I'd never felt so much pressure to do well. Tears were shed for sure. Thanks to Jake for continuing to have faith in me and get me work!
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