Thursday, July 24, 2008

The Complete Newspaper Layout and Backstory

80 Hours in the making... The Prop Newspapers are finally done. I know everybody has seen these images but I wanted to lay them out as they will be presented to show some of the Producers etc... Exactly what I did. If the film bombs, there will be one good thing come out of this and that is I went from not knowing how to just open an Adobe InDesign file to being an Intermediate user over night.

It is a hell of a program for many needs and without it, I would have had to do this in illustrator or worse had this thing in a 250 layer photoshop file.

The Metro Name plate of course was aimed to mimic the The New York Times, but I tried to still have an old time Newspaper feel to it, hence the Headline Font used for "Leather Strap Strangler..."I chopped and mashed up a bit. I've said it before and will say it again, I HATE TIMES NEW ROMAN and managed even with all 30 publications I did to stay away from it entirely. The Body font is Bookman Old Style, kerned and horizontally expanded to give it a more sort of Newspaper look.

Manish Patel is a good friend of mine and our schedules are just way off so we rarely get together or speak on the phone but I wanted him to know how much his friendship meant to me by making him a psycho/serial killer from years past in Metro. What a guy I am, hunh? He had a nickname, "Diablo," back in High School, so I thought it to be fitting to use that as his alter ego. He liked it. I'm very friend-based oriented so any shout outs or tributes I get the opportunity to give, I do. See below as my buddy Doug also makes the front page as an Irish Chef opening a restaurant. He's Irish. He's a chef. It works.

The Sewer Rats was a last minute idea. I opened the local Hickory Daily Record and saw that they had little Hickory Crawdad columns all over and in every column was the Crawdad logo. I'm like, "SHIT!" Metro has to have a sporting team and I have to make a logo. The Rats logo sucks, in fact I made it in about twenty minutes, but nonetheless gives my city yet another dimension of life.

So for any Conspiracy Theory Mooks out there, I'm going to tell you the story of my good friend Freddy and how he came to be the Sex Addicted Mayor caught in a scandal. I've already received one pot shot about him being black like Obama, and in office with scandal as if they were saying I was speaking out against something I thought was going to happen if Obama was voted into office. I can assure you, that is so far from the truth...

Anyway, if you read this then you know I had thoughts of using several different people as Mayor. Well, as time began to tick down and I had not received pictures from the guys I asked... I started making the magazines anyway. Freddy at this point in time was to play the News Vendor so he couldn't be the Mayor too. (Unless we were doing past and present type stuff.) Well Muki had taken some great pictures of Freddy, Mark, myself and others while we were shooting The Tag Along Trailer. So I decided, I would use Freddy's pictures as placeholders so I could kind go ahead and lay everything out until the time came to switch the pictures out. As the magazines kept coming, I got kind of attached to Freddy as the ficticious Mayor Walter Weitz and it seemed like the work was done on the magazines so why not... But I had promised Freddy a part in the movie so no matter what we would have to switch them out. Then I got an email from Freddy saying he didn't want to be in the film but wanted to help out behind the camera. The pictures were already there, so Bada Bing we have our Sex Addicted BLACK Mayor. That's how that worked, honestly. Nothing more than dumb, good luck.

The Mayor's name comes from the two people I envy and respect the most in this business that I know personally: Heather walter and Ryan Weitz. (Both will be a part of filming.)



Inside Front Page


This page will actually be on camera so I had to spruce it up a bit. Most papers including the HDR place the Obituaries there. I'm a little superstitious and paranoid so I wasn't about to make up fake deaths using random names for anything in the world. SORRY.... Nope. So, I decided to place "Letters to the Editor" in that spot. I put little captions from readers who are all a part of the production with the exception of my friend, Jeremy Dayton. A couple of the thoughts attack the exact thing I'm creating. Others are actual points and loop holes in our plot, HEE HEE.

Underneath that, you know the story, I had always wanted to do a political cartoon. Well I got to do two. (The Diablo Comic you see is still the rough draft.) The final will appear in the actual paper. The Shark reference doesn't show up in the pages of Metro Post but you will see where that joke comes in on the pages of the Skyline Daily Record and City Story Magazine.

Then underneath that is filler from first page and of course my fake ball teams: The Metro Sewer Rats and the Inner City Pests which is a Minor League Football Team(Semi Pro.)





Inside Back Page


Again if you know me, you know I have a fetish for pens. I have to have three writing utencils on me at all times and they have to be nice. Bics and Paper Mates won't do. If I leave the house without them, (rarely happens since the sickness has been going on for over six years,) I have to turn around and go back. The pens have to write black and the shell cannot be of bright color unless it is silver. (No Red, Pink, Blue.) Seriously, it's awful. The three pens' MO is simple: One Ball Fine Point. One Barrel Ink or Fountain, Medium to Fine Point and One usually Rotring Felt Art Pen, 0.25. I do alot of writing, sketching etc everywhere I go so I must have them in order to stay sane. Pencils are touch and go. If I'm drawing, it has to be a Staedtler Mechanical. If I'm writing, the trusty, (AND ONLY BRIGHT COLOR,) Sanford 2B Wooden pencil with no eraser. I own 8 Cross pens and 3 of each size of the Staedtler and trust me, if one goes missing it's off to the Art Store I go to replace it immediately which really defeats the purpose of having 3 of each doesn't it? If I go into Office Depot, or Staples you can count on a ten to fifteen minute stop in the pen aisle as I check for new and cool pens all the manufacturers make. My wife hates it so as a tribute to my recognizing my sickness, the 40% off Sale of Pens and Pencils at the "Ink Office Superstore," had to be in done.




Outside Back Page


I've always wanted to build and host a Haunted Something or other at Halloween. I've never had time nor money to do so, but it is on my list of To Do's and as my kids grow older I feel I'll find myself in a better position to do it and have a great time. Well, because this film is taken place right before Halloween of this year, I ran an ad for the Haunted Castle appearing at the Six Flags type place there in Metro. When I lived in LA, I worked at the kids version of Hard Rock Cafe, called Cartoonsville. I waited on Sam Raimi, Diane Lane, Hugh Hefner, and others there. It was the coolest funnest place I worked at outside the business while I was in LA so I thought it would be fitting now that that place is closed down to have them host it. I'm foreshadowing an event I'm gonna' do one day on the back cover. (Not to mention, saves me a lot of the little details by running a full page ad.) The special Appearances are all friends of mine from Patterson School to UCLA.




The Skyline Daily Record was kind of a last minute thing. All cities have more than one newspaper and since we have to do big runs to get these papers printed, I thought making an alternative would emphasize the realness of all of this. There is also one flashback scene early in the film where Henry is stalking Dana at a coffee shop. He uses the paper to cover his face and since it's two weeks earlier, I had to do a different cover anyway. Why not make it a different paper all together?

So here we go:

Outside Front Page

As an ode to Jaws and I imagining Metro being next to water why not on top of sex addicted mayors and serial killers have a territorial shark problem too that seems like it just won't go away. Thanks to my brilliant father's photography, (He's shot a picture of everything, animal, you name it,) it made it easy to add this element. As the story goes, a kid lost his arm and leg surfing from a 17 foot Mako Shark. Well they closed the beaches and killed the shark but wait.... Another man is killed after that by a shark so the Bounty for the deadly shark is raised to $25,000. Funny thing is if you go back up to the Metro Post and look at the Sewer Rats opponents, one is the called the Wave Crest Makos. Underneath the date of the game there is a disclaimer stating: "pending postponement." Reason behind this, with people dying from a Mako Shark problem, the last thing the city needs is a team with the name Mako to come to town. HA, HA!



Notice the corner story... Since this is two weeks earlier there are only two bodies and today a third so with the Mayor and Shark problem, our Leather Strap Strangler has not become the center of attention yet. Then I figured in the midst of all the awfulness this city is enduring why not have some hometown heroes in their Minor League Baseball team that nobody really pays attention to until they go undefeated for half the season which in Baseball is damn near impossible. There's the little positive to counter all the negative.





This paper's outside will only be used so the inside pages are irrelevant.

Outside Back Page
Ah, the big blockbuster coming from Freddy Robinson in 2009, The Tag Along. Had to do it... Had to do it... As it was to be shot before I shot this.






The Skyline Daily Record gets it's name because of the local paper here we call the Hickory Daily Record. Lora Dellinger, the layout manager there walked me through the newspaper layout process and took time out of her busy day to help a clueless kid. I didn't feel calling it the Lora Gazette or something like that would be so good, so since she works for the paper, The Skyline Daily Record was due. (I slaved over that Skyline Graphic behind the name for hours and when I was finished was dead set on using it for the Metro Post, but found it just didn't look right anywhere, so I designed The SDR Name Plate around that that rendering. I felt compelled.)

Skyline Daily Record - October 24th, 2008
This issue will just be laying in piles around the newsstand so no inside or back pages were made. I will probably just copy the ads from the other since it will never show on camera.

This issue has the usual suspect articles as the serial killer panic heightens. If you check the corner top story you will see my tribute to the Crown Cinema VI here in my hometown. It shut down 2 years ago as corporate Carmike slammed in with it's 15 screen multiplex. I grew up watching movies there and if I was financial stable I would bid to buy that place and turn it into a 1.00/arthouse theater. For now a little, ad in a fake paper is all I can do.




So there you go. There is the method to my madness and why I took making these props so seriously. As many will say, "nice fake newspaper." I will say, "yeah, nice, but pretty cool too if you really read it."

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