heimbarMucke 2001

CD cover and fancy 6-pagebooklet containing the tracklistings of a MP3 compilation of 126 indies.
processing snapshots of life in a famous student bar onto a memorable artwork.

style: textlayers projected on any area (adept or inadept)
of pretty random party-snapshots. (ok: pretty, random.)

 

suiting the title, a view of the heimBar shows up as background on the front cover. the keeper has been exchanged by a very happy hühnerkocher, as has the sign above him. his beer pad glasses have been overpainted to show his girlfriend as an optical illusion. beside the half-opaque title typography there's the logo of the kulturinitiative papenburg e.V. with dancing ekkes on the desk.

technique: a mask hides the original curtain behind stefan and lets the heimbar appear. colors had to be turned a few grades to match the lightening of the environment. the beer pads show four instances of the same picture of silvie's face, mirrored, scaled and with different warmth and copy modes.

the title uses the monotype impact font and a trendy low line spacing. the layer had to be copied to find the right amounts of opacity for brightening and color boosting, so that it keeps clearly legible without killing the structural information under it. the subtitle comes less opaque for lower emphasizement.
no masking was necessary for the logo; is only allowed to brighten the picture's pixel values.

have a glance at six 600dpi details here.(33k)

the content of the cover versions folder shows up on a moody atmosphere with dim warm light and even a candle for amorphis' version of "light my fire". typography starts following the architectural structure, but unrecognizedly breaks out to keep the flow and legibility. the cheesy ceilign area has been fold up into a threedimentional table-fussball.

technique: fortunately this photo has been taken using no flash. the warm atmosphere will be lost with every attempt taken to safe ink by rising the color values. the narrow color field allowes a inverse copy mode for the tracklisting layer without generating a mess of colors.
to be emphasized, the title, cover versions appears in clean white. it also follows the cupboard flight and thus balances the opposite skew.
the transformed table-fussball uses a luminance copy mode to preserve the color palette.

see also 4 details of page one (50k)

FJ eva is very happy to fridgejockey a very big refridgerator. she also wears a nice top explaining what the letters on this big refridgerator are all about.
having the same color as the bar they are standing on, some evil drinks are allowed to stay seated awhilst the pads under them had to disappear.

technique: the whole thing was almost but not entirely unsquare in the beginning. a nonlinear stretch was meant to lead the footage to 1:1 aspect ratio, preserving eva's 90-60-90. not reaching the goal, everything had to be streched individually in the end: the fridge, the bar, the cashbox, and the background.
in the end, two folder's tracks find enough space to display following the aspects of their background. cutting the lower left corner keeps this dense layer still legible without cheating with the aspect. for the other layer horizontal character scaling and spacing and word spacing was mixed with irregular transformation to create a unnatural strech over the desk starting left-aligned and loosing ratio but somehow matching the right border in the end.

blaubär and henne don't miss the framed collection of photos on the wall, that had to disappear on page three to make place for folders six and seven's tracks. the additional information for track fourteen couldn't be integrated in the text block and unfortunately cuts blaubär's throat with the words "killer mix". the tv comes alive to display the folder's names in a typical green bad-tv-signal style. the advertisement space on the ash-tray is still for rent.

technique: henne didn't change his sexy bright pink shirt before collapsing on the bar, so i had to do it for him. again the wooden wall was replicated before the stamp tool helped me to put away some clothes that were hanging around on the tv. the dart wall in the background was short of light so the gradient curves got heavily manipulated in this corner.
apart from the usual scaling/spacing action to fit into the space and around blaubär's head, the text doesn't follow any directive lines on this page or try to appear naturally on the wooden fabric. therefor the plain appearance is compensated by a heavy shadow that also improves the legibility of 31 artist names and track titles.

check out the resolution in three details of page three (36k)

folder number eight's content finds place in large friendly letters (font is fixedsys) on an artificially clearified wooden wall above the baguette-grill, where pretty large baguettes are being grilled. the kanji-tattoo on eva's arm emerges from displaying the characters i-n-d-i-e-8 with a japanese font in windows (indie 8) and by a curious coincidence means "i mixed my first fussfehler when i was 8". the last word in the title of track number 11, "figure in the mirror" got lost during organisation of the available space and was found later reflecting on the desk.

technique: after cropping the interesting part of the original photo and adjusting levels to provide a warm, bright background, some wall has been replicated to hide two cupboards all around eva. for the main part the original area has been mirrored, so that shadows and structures don't show a discontinuity at the border. the typography on eva's arm has been slightly skewed and shadowed with a dirty dark green color to express a genuine tattoo-look.
the baguettes in the grilling gadget have been enlarged using lasso and soft marquee border right as in a thousand other cases.

originally very dark, the background of page five

technique: originally dark photo. ha dto be brightened.
indie10 typo is rendered for distortion effect.
indie12 typo is not rendered. it's hand painted.

the backSide of the booklet is an alternative front cover.

technique: background processed levels, radial blur, waves and lighning effects.
kranes processed colour phase, transformation and liquidize tool.
typography has low line spacing, photoshop effect layers and copy mode.

see this detail of page six (27k)

while the footage for the pages of the booklet was chosen to carry tracklisting typography, the backside was designed to contribute to the protagonists (and antagonists) of the heimbar. in the most cases the footage contained mainly unsexy backgrounds; so the challenge was to construct an impacting ensemble of all these people instead of just welding the footage together or cropping out the heads.

technique: the idea was to erase as much color as possible without loosing the complete background information. the heads remain as hotspots in a puzzled field of heimbar structures, maybe as some of us remember them after a long night down there.
the spaces of the backgrounds have simply been blackened with the filler tool (took me quite a few minutes...). the entire picture processes inversion to make the black background become white and the yellow heads become blue. another adjustment layer is used to lead back the rgb-gradient curve from black into white on the last 10%, folding the blackest parts in the faces into this strange false-true-gradient.

see these details of the back cover: detail I (21k) - detail II (49k)

1. eva's famous baguette (10k)
2. silvie & hühnerkocher under the famous beer-fatamorgana (5k)
3. blaubär & henne after the famous killer mix (11k)
4. famous keeper holger (keeping the footageBar only) (11k)
5. the most famous green square @ heimbar (10k)
6. mostly famous: hühnerkocher (7k)
7. eva jockeying famous fridges. (11k)

the applied fonts are
monotype impact for the title and on page two.
souvenir Light on page one.
ozHandicraft BT on page three.
fixedsys,japanese and inkpen on page four.
treboucht MS for page five.