Walking and Talking was one of those independent-type movies about a youngish cluster of people fumbling their way through this mess called Life--and in the process, doing a lot of walking and, yes, talking about it.

A lot of the scenes found their crux around this bedroom setup, so I used that as the focus of my main menu design. It was an easy excuse to stick scenes from the movie into little frames, and have a lush buttery glow over the whole thing. I must have done this right around the time of the Ozzy piece, because I rebuilt the duck wallpaper from the film in Photoshop, and used it on the wall. (I'm tempted to dig up the layered files, and put the Ozzy wallpaper in there instead.)

I don't recall why this wasn't picked. It still looks kinda nice, though perhaps the pictures come off as too small to read, which might have been a concern for the client.

Clubhouse was a 2004 TV series in which a young boy gets his dream job of being batboy for his favorite big league team, finding out that behind-the-scenes isn't as wonderful as what he'd expected. Hilarity, or something, ensued for a handful of episodes.

Around this period, the well-respected firm Imaginary Forces had a number of lovely high-profile titles and key-art pieces everywhere, and so for some reason, I decided to emulate what was becoming a stylistic habit for I.F.: dark, layered, blue glowing stuff. This was before I had a chance to see any of the footage from the show itself, so I had no idea what the emotional tone was going to be. And despite the loss-of-innocence angle the plot held, the show had a bright, cheery, ain't-baseball-still-grand aura about it that this dark, slick vision simply didn't convey.

The premise of this movie was sorta like Zack and Miri, if I recall rightly--suburban locals make a porno to raise some money.

I thought the notion of putting everyone outside a Times Square-style XXX theatre, with the sort of dim neon lighting often seen on those "gritty" posters of New York you often see framed in shops everywhere. But the result, though fitting for the porno world, came off pretty joyless-looking for what was supposed to be a comedy, and I'm sure that's why this didn't make it.

I did about 3 looks for this title, all of which came out reasonably well, methinks. As I recall, the client liked this one, but it didn't make it past the first round. One of my fellow designers got his chosen, and it was deserving of it.

If I had to change something now, I'd either remove--or otherwise make more room for--the little characters to the left of that big head of the King. It's a bit cramped. Keep in mind that the compositions had to work in a 4x3 screen ratio as well as the 16x9 shown here, so that often makes for a tight space to fit information into.

This was meant as an idea for the DVD main menu of "The Osbournes, Season One". The whole concept was that we would have a long zoom from outside the house, in through the window, and finally to this little chunk of wall, with its parodic vision of the old-time family portrait and framed sampler. My favorite detail is the wall paper--funny how by putting things into a pattern, even bats, drops of blood, and the numbers "666" can seem pretty and heartwarming.

Why didn't this make it? Because the project was pulled before we even had a chance to submit the designs--hence the lack of buttons on this menu. I didn't even get enough time to type 'em on.

Welcome To The Slushpile!

Greetings, salutations, and overall, a welcome to my slushpile.

Herein you'll find the sloughed-off compositions of my design career--pieces that, for better or worse, didn't make it to the public in the form of DVD menus, packages, web pages, or whatever. And by "better or worse", I mean it--some of these I still think were worthwhile, while others were obvious products of immaturity, not getting the concept, or out-and-out self-delusion. I'll try to give some background on each example, as well as a guess as to why it didn't fly. It's up to you, of course, to decide whether I'm right or wrong.

The examples come from a range of design houses I worked for, with on average 3-5 artists submitting anywhere from 3 to 8 (!) looks for each title. In some cases, you'll see storyboards for the motion leading up to the main menu, if that project was budgeted for it.

So hey...learn from my mistakes, if you can. Or at the very least, find a bit of amusement. This is my Ozymandias. Look upon it, and despair. Or admire. Or laugh.

[Image created using Wikimedia Commons photo by S. Müller.]