CD cover and 12-page lyrics booklet for a 17-track all-time-favorites compilation.

style: seemless, frameless, epic, tragic, and absolut inconsistent.
almost but not quite entirely unminimalistic. perfect thanx to the footage ;)

 

front: the association with christmas, religious content or classical church organ music is absolutely coincidental.

  technique: multiplied attractors and multiple offsetting.
the source shows tourists in the tunnel leading behind the niagara falls, canada. the cold misty mood of the black and white photograph by alexander fekete has been changed into a very warm one by using the colorize option of the color/saturation menu. a copy of that layer was filtered by "glowing contures", revealing the compression as a squarry pattern, and masked by a radial fitting the pictures flight line. another copy was square-oscillated and reassembled the borders of the source to strong bars, adding effect to the allover kartesian structure. it was masked in the same way. on the third copy a wild copy&paste session crowds up the whole space with series of the attractors of the source, dissolving the obviousness of the square oscillation-effect of the other layers.

page twelve: the slogan "thank you for choosing" closes the booklet, showing up on the tunnel photo in it's original black and white style. in variation to the cover's front, the warm tones on this page emerge from a third source element, a hand, grabbed from TV. the hand element repeats the setup of three layers: one has been square-oscillated to add color and, unlike the front page, emphasize the original's frame. the second has been cropped and transformed into very three-dimensional fingers using manual liquidization, affirmed by the equally morphed lines of the TV-signal. the third has been inverted, vertically mirrored and oscillated using only two square-waves with extreme different values.
eight bytes of typography and a 4k bitmap of the blausand logo finish the page.

have a glance at some 600dpi details:
front cover detail I (40k)
front cover detail II (40k)
front cover detail III (58k)
page twelve detail I (25k)
page twelve detail II (38k)

a photo of the river danube is the gloomy enough carrier of the original hungarian lyrics of song [2], "gloomy sunday". the title is just disappearing at the horizon, 42 lines realistically follow the natural curve of the river's flow, leaving the last line "Vége a világnak!" in large friendly letters at the bottom center of the page, where the river fades on the second motive, an ancient wall in praha, capital of czechia. the woods left to the river provide some space for a fantastic german translation of the lyrics, bright yellow toned to separate it from the general blue-toned brightness gradient.
on the opposite shore, a black woodden landtongue provides a contrasty background for the title of song [4], radiohead's "exit music". the rest of it's lyrics carve in a gentle bright tone out of this wall, leaving someone in a black coat untouched, who is, right as in the verse ending above him, trying to choke. this man in a black coat is also subject in song [3], "eukalyptus" by st otten, whose lyrics show up in the black sky above this wall. quite surrounded by blackness, we read of the second person in "eukalyptus": "der zweite irrt im raum herum, findet mich nicht - sei's drum". the third verse begins above it's own title with the words: "ich schwing mich hoch, bin endlich frei..."
sharing the same horizon line, the sky above the river danube shows the english translation of "gloomy sunday" as it is sung by björk. a column for each of the three verses ends in "gloomy sunday", assembling to a repetition in the blurry distance.

technique: the montage of the two photos was difficult for some reasons. the blue river and the yellow wall originally mixed in a ugly saturated pink. to enhance the color of the area where the wall appears in the river without loosing much of the wall's detail was only posssible by creating another adjusting layer. merging the two photos, it took some time painting different masks to preserve certain contrasts of both halfs, mainly the dark areas like the slim dark forrest horizon on the danube photo or the shadow of the toi-boxeson the other. because of the details of the wall structure, this could not be reached by using a darken-mode
the hungarian lyrics had to be rendered, before they could be treated with filter oscillation. and freely skewed and streched. then the k... of "hibáznak..." could also be transformed into a hook (liquidize) that completes the ring of connections between the three themes.
every verse of text has it's own layer to keep the exact position and line spacing individually adjustable. the font used is Monotype corsiva.

see also 4 details of page 2/3 (86k)

containing the lyrics of song [6], locusts "noone in the world" and song [7], "so broken" by björk, this page comes up with female grace and an exciting perversion of light and color. like some other pages, the separation has left the straight cut in the center and is found as the border of the left motive, a stonecold contrasted, but carefully colored, very intimate portrait of a woman looking down on those trembling two lines of locust, as they align on the sideboard of the other scene, where color has completely faded. again on a stone background, light casts a horizontal shadow, replied by the sorrowful look of the "venecian woman", that seems to be separated in all possible ways from the other, concentrating on the lyrics of the seventh song, which right-align with the original image's border, and dare to cross the woman's legs, not to cut them, but to separate from the image and hover above it, carefully framing her feet.

technique: the gradient curves of the venecian motive have been heavily modified to take out the big shadow's darkness without harming the contrast of the woman. both sources have been simply transformed to fit the 2:1 ratio. some dark glow effect saves the lyrics of "noone on the world".

page six technique: this impressing picture of eilan donan castle, scotland, has been rudely inversed to safe ink, slightly color-turned to avoid misfitting, oversaturated blue tones, and exactly mirrored to provide a counterweight to page seven. apart from that the sky had to be streched to perform an almost unrecognizable warm gradient all over the page. the result is a dreamworld castle, far above the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow.

page seven technique: continueing the dream theme, a blurry aspect at the port in toronto, canada, has been squared to create a separate partition, only slightly familiar to the opposite page due to some general similarities in color. provoked by the background color, the lyrics appear in neat red, björk following the flight of the port, sting taking counterpart by emphasizing the page's lower corners.

check out the resolution in 4 details of page 6/7 (70k)

the title of this photograph, "die welt ist schön" (the world is beautyful), led me to choosing it as the background for song [16], baz luhrman's sunscreen song, which also helps you with a really remarkable view of life, the universe and everything.

technique: the heavy duty of about 420 words could only be contained on a double page, so the original photograph had to be streched and mirrored, following the aspect and creating another enveloping shadow on the right side.
formatting the extremely long lyrics means finding hundreds of spacing and scaling values for single letters, words, lines and paragraphs, resulting in a wild streching style that allows emphasizement on every keyword or -phrase.

see also page 8/9 detail I (70k)
and page 8/9 detail II & III (76k)

the photo of herr krossi evaporates pure happiness, like everybody who has listened to all the seventeen songs of melchior McElch's finest I. it seems that he has found what signor rossi is looking for in the lyrics of la felicitas.

page ten technique: according to the theme this page is allowed to make use of another font: comic sans. that allows the handdrawn lines of the lyrics to better integrate into the whole thing. while this line in a childish way stresses the shape of herr krossi's head, the layouted part of the lyrics conserve as much of the background as possible, providing a wide gap where the eye of herr krossi appears, and using a white color, which also mirrors the color relation of the opposite page.
page eleven technique:fortunately the nature in the background could be streched to form a brightened second page for the tracklisting, which consists of two layers of typography, differing in text size, color, and offset. that makes the second, descriptional line of each track appear like a shadow of the above line containing number, title and playing time.
both layers are held in a blocked mode (which is not easy to find in photoshop: draw a rectangle with the text tool instead of clicking at a point!). therefore the tracknumbers align on the left side awhilst the playing times align on the right side. inbetween the effect is a wild field of words emerging from or resulting in the song titles.
the most time was spent finding the correct facts of composers, copyright etc. in the internet and/or the source media.

see also a small detail of the tracklisting (30k)

the photo of the tunnel behind niagara falls, canada repeats on the backSide of melchior McElch's finest I. this time, it has been encolored only slightly, again with a warm tone, to carry title and tracklisting information in a complementary grey blue. again a copy of the tunnel photo layer has been square-oscillated and brings up geometric appearance. some characters of the tracklisting had to be manually brightened to stay legible in front of the dark floor. the words "over the rainbow" come to lay over the brightly shining ceiling of the tunnel. carefully adjusted shadowing effects and a hard light-mode make the typography seem to be softly stamped on the canvas.

see this a detail of the back cover (39k)

1. danube (5k)
2. man in front of a wall, praha (3k)
3. eilan donan castle, scotland (5k)
4. fuzzy view of the port in toronto, canada (7k)
5. portrait of a woman (5k)
6. femme a venice (5k)
7. die welt ist schön (5k)
8. herr krossi (5k)
9. tunnel @ niagra falls, canada (5k)
10. fingers from TV (5k)
11. thank you for choosing (3k)

© blausand - last update:

melchior McElch's finest I audio-page.

mon 28-oct-02 15:38

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