For about 11 months now – ever since I started working on SOURLANDS – I’ve been brainstorming the DVD cover. A DVD cover is important. Despite good advice, many people do judge books and movies by their covers.
Pasted below is the DVD cover I’ve settled on for SOURLANDS. The next image is another concept featuring an ovenbird, a design I also like, but which I ultimately decided against.
If you’re interested in the inner workings of a graphic designer’s mind, read on:
DVD cover #1 is inspired by two of the most famous photos ever taken, Earthrise and The Blue Marble.
The Earthrise photo was taken on December 24, 1968, by astronaut William Anders. This was during the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned voyage to orbit the Moon.
According to a recounting by Bill McKibben in the book Eaarth, these were the emotions of the astronauts onboard:
Commander Frank Borman said later it was “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was simply black or white. But not the earth.” The third member of the crew, Jim Lovell, put it more simply: the earth, he said, suddenly appeared as a “grand oasis.”
The Blue Marble was taken by astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission on December 7, 1972. According to the encyclopedia, “Apollo 17 was the last manned lunar mission. No humans since have been at a range where taking a whole-Earth photograph, such as The Blue Marble, would be possible.”
The Sourlands are also a beautiful oasis, and it’s this subtle connection I want to encourage with the DVD cover. Plus:
-The stories in the documentary are simultaneously local and global in scope.
-I think the aerial image of the Sourland’s forest is striking. Many people I met during the course of making the documentary, even people who had lived in Central New Jersey for years, didn’t know what the Sourlands were. Take a look at the DVD cover… those are the Sourlands.
-Over the next few years, I’m going to be looking at this DVD cover a lot. So a good check is asking myself the question, “Am I going to get tired of this DVD cover?” I don’t think I will. It’s simple and classic.
Okay, so now for what I see as the one drawback of this design.
The feedback I’ve received from designer friends is that it’s a little dark overall, and rather serious. And it is, there’s no two ways around that. But I can live with a little dark and rather serious. If people don’t buy the documentary because they’re not in the mood to watch something serious, I can live with that. Sourlands is entertaining and occasionally funny, but at its heart it’s a serious film.
Now some thoughts on the first runner-up, the DVD cover featuring an ovenbird. There are elements of this concept I really like, and this is the image I’ve been using on the Sourlands website for most of the past year. But in the end I decided against it.
Ovenbirds are migratory songbirds that are, by many accounts, the signature bird of the Sourlands forest. Many ovenbirds winter in Central America and spend their summers in the Northeast. They can be elusive and hard to see, but their populations are doing well in the Sourlands region.
In general, migratory songbirds are a wonderful symbol of the Sourlands. Migratory songbird populations worldwide are threatened by habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change, which are all issues I explore in the documentary. Overall, birds are a great indicator of the health of an ecosystem. And what I really like about songbirds is that they sing. Their presence makes the forest a more beautiful place. Henry David Thoreau once wrote of the woodthrush’s song:
“Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him.”
The ovenbird DVD cover is colorful and intriguing and it’s also one I don’t think I’d get tired of looking at.
The drawback I see to this concept is that there’s nothing in the image that would make a passerby suspect that the SOURLANDS documentary might have more to it than birds and trees. The documentary is also about sustainable agriculture and energy, and this DVD cover doesn’t support that idea. To me, this feels like a very specific design, a smaller idea, while the Green Marble design feels like a bigger idea.
In the end, I feel most strongly about putting the image of the Sourlands region on the DVD cover. It shows people what home looks like when you back up a bit.
Although there can be only one DVD cover, the nice thing is that there will be an opportunity to use a number of images in promoting the film. So the ovenbird image will still have an important role to play, just not the starring role.
Thanks for reading. And just a friendly reminder that we’re still in fundraising mode: The last day to reach our fundraising goal on Kickstarter in February 2. Thank you for continuing to help spread the link:
http://kck.st/ulvTrm
We’re 45% of the way to our goal with 16 days left. So SOURLANDS needs to raise about $5,000 in a short timeframe. At this point we’re likely going to need to find some bigger organizations to sign on for some of the bigger sponsorship rewards. If you haven’t seen it, the biggest reward we’re offering costs $2,000 and includes DVDs, a public screening/educational license, recognition at the top of the film credits, and, here’s where I think there’s some great value: 10 hours of video or editing work, by me, on a project of your choice. I know there are organizations out there paying for video production work anyway, so if you know any, please ask them to consider this reward (Limited to projects in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania.)
All best,
Jared Flesher
director, SOURLANDS
Pasted below is the DVD cover I’ve settled on for SOURLANDS. The next image is another concept featuring an ovenbird, a design I also like, but which I ultimately decided against.
If you’re interested in the inner workings of a graphic designer’s mind, read on:
DVD cover #1 is inspired by two of the most famous photos ever taken, Earthrise and The Blue Marble.
The Earthrise photo was taken on December 24, 1968, by astronaut William Anders. This was during the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned voyage to orbit the Moon.
According to a recounting by Bill McKibben in the book Eaarth, these were the emotions of the astronauts onboard:
Commander Frank Borman said later it was “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was simply black or white. But not the earth.” The third member of the crew, Jim Lovell, put it more simply: the earth, he said, suddenly appeared as a “grand oasis.”
The Blue Marble was taken by astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission on December 7, 1972. According to the encyclopedia, “Apollo 17 was the last manned lunar mission. No humans since have been at a range where taking a whole-Earth photograph, such as The Blue Marble, would be possible.”
The Sourlands are also a beautiful oasis, and it’s this subtle connection I want to encourage with the DVD cover. Plus:
-The stories in the documentary are simultaneously local and global in scope.
-I think the aerial image of the Sourland’s forest is striking. Many people I met during the course of making the documentary, even people who had lived in Central New Jersey for years, didn’t know what the Sourlands were. Take a look at the DVD cover… those are the Sourlands.
-Over the next few years, I’m going to be looking at this DVD cover a lot. So a good check is asking myself the question, “Am I going to get tired of this DVD cover?” I don’t think I will. It’s simple and classic.
Okay, so now for what I see as the one drawback of this design.
The feedback I’ve received from designer friends is that it’s a little dark overall, and rather serious. And it is, there’s no two ways around that. But I can live with a little dark and rather serious. If people don’t buy the documentary because they’re not in the mood to watch something serious, I can live with that. Sourlands is entertaining and occasionally funny, but at its heart it’s a serious film.
Now some thoughts on the first runner-up, the DVD cover featuring an ovenbird. There are elements of this concept I really like, and this is the image I’ve been using on the Sourlands website for most of the past year. But in the end I decided against it.
Ovenbirds are migratory songbirds that are, by many accounts, the signature bird of the Sourlands forest. Many ovenbirds winter in Central America and spend their summers in the Northeast. They can be elusive and hard to see, but their populations are doing well in the Sourlands region.
In general, migratory songbirds are a wonderful symbol of the Sourlands. Migratory songbird populations worldwide are threatened by habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change, which are all issues I explore in the documentary. Overall, birds are a great indicator of the health of an ecosystem. And what I really like about songbirds is that they sing. Their presence makes the forest a more beautiful place. Henry David Thoreau once wrote of the woodthrush’s song:
“Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him.”
The ovenbird DVD cover is colorful and intriguing and it’s also one I don’t think I’d get tired of looking at.
The drawback I see to this concept is that there’s nothing in the image that would make a passerby suspect that the SOURLANDS documentary might have more to it than birds and trees. The documentary is also about sustainable agriculture and energy, and this DVD cover doesn’t support that idea. To me, this feels like a very specific design, a smaller idea, while the Green Marble design feels like a bigger idea.
In the end, I feel most strongly about putting the image of the Sourlands region on the DVD cover. It shows people what home looks like when you back up a bit.
Although there can be only one DVD cover, the nice thing is that there will be an opportunity to use a number of images in promoting the film. So the ovenbird image will still have an important role to play, just not the starring role.
Thanks for reading. And just a friendly reminder that we’re still in fundraising mode: The last day to reach our fundraising goal on Kickstarter in February 2. Thank you for continuing to help spread the link:
http://kck.st/ulvTrm
We’re 45% of the way to our goal with 16 days left. So SOURLANDS needs to raise about $5,000 in a short timeframe. At this point we’re likely going to need to find some bigger organizations to sign on for some of the bigger sponsorship rewards. If you haven’t seen it, the biggest reward we’re offering costs $2,000 and includes DVDs, a public screening/educational license, recognition at the top of the film credits, and, here’s where I think there’s some great value: 10 hours of video or editing work, by me, on a project of your choice. I know there are organizations out there paying for video production work anyway, so if you know any, please ask them to consider this reward (Limited to projects in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania.)
All best,
Jared Flesher
director, SOURLANDS