Two by Marcel Carné

On September 18th, The Criterion Collection releases two films by Marcel Carné; Children of Paradise and Les Visiteurs du Soir. I had the pleasure of designing for each. The pair feature cover art by Alexandre Trauner who served as production designer on both of the films. These are actual production paintings and, without giving too much away, there's more where that came from. I recreated the title treatments for the covers based on each of the film's main titles. You can read about the process for Children of Paradise here. I'll have more to show of these packages as the release date nears. In the meantime, if you can't wait to see Children of Paradise and you happen to be near where this spectacular restoration is touring, do check it out. You'll be glad you did!

Lonesome



Lonesome arrives on August 28th from the Criterion Collection --a jaw-dropping film if there ever was one. It's amazing to me that it's never been released for home video in any format until now. Of course there's a story behind that. Better, I think, to leave the telling to Criterion when the time comes. I will say this, whatever a movie could do in 1928 Lonesome does and does it gloriously. I mean camera moves, optical effects, miniatures, sound, even color --you name it.  For the cover I worked in the tradition of the day and hand-painted the whole thing including the type. I drew my inspiration from the film of course as well as the work of the great Tom Purvis who knew something about weekends at the shore in the 1920s.

Brief Encounter

Some menu designs for Brief Encounter, the fourth film in the boxed set David Lean Directs Noël Coward. One of the challenges designing this set was creating a unifying visual theme for the four films --something that would tie them all together. Still, I didn't want them conforming rigidly to a single template. Changing up the typefaces was a good start but at the same time I wanted to take things a little further than that. Formally speaking, the set is bookended by two black and white films with two color ones in between. Should the black and white menus have one look and the color ones another? That seemed too on the nose and unnecessarily segregated. Every other film receiving similar treatments felt better. So these menus for Brief Encounter echo the visual themes I established with the Blithe Spirit menus, just as This Happy Breed echos the motifs of the menus for In Which We Serve.

• David Lean Directs Noël Coward

This Happy Breed

DVD Menu designs for This Happy Breed, the third film in the boxed set David Lean Directs Noël Coward. The master for This Happy Breed is simply beautiful and about as sensitive a rendering of color as one would expect from The Criterion Collection. Though you may detect a quality shift for a couple of the images on these menus here. That's an affect of the design process. Those stills weren't available to me at the time the menus were designed, so I worked with place-holder images knowing they'd be traded-out once the work left my desk. Menus, by the way, are often designed in advance of the packaging (though not the covers) due to the time required to produce the discs.

• David Lean Directs Noël Coward