First Night Design | #CoverMakeOver Week 2 — The Money Pit

#photorehabcovermakeover Week 2 The Money Pit © Sarah Vernon

Already it’s Week 2 for the revamped Cover Makeover Challenge now administered by Julie Powell, Photographer & Graphic Artist.

The challenge this week was to do a cover for The Money Pit, a 1986 film starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long. Frankly, the original poster is very dated, very ’70s in style. You may well think the same.

Storyline:
Walter Fielding and Anna Crowley have to start looking for a new house – but there’s not much they can afford! This soon changes when they meet a lonely old con artist who sells them a beautiful mansion at a ridiculously low price. Only there’s a catch. The second they move into the house it falls apart, starting with the stairway collapsing to the bathtub falling through the floor to eventually the chimney falling into the house! Finally, they have to renovate the house before the frame collapses but the renovations also prove to be a disaster. IMdb

I had no idea how to do a cover for this film and pondered for several days. Today, realising that time was of the essence, I found a photograph of a dilapidated, abandoned house from Wikimedia and looked at it for several hours!

One texture from Kerstin Frank to brighten the original image and a green box with details of the stars, director and producer, and I had to stop and ponder once more.

I was happy with the fonts — Skia Regular for Steven Spielberg and Richard Benjamin, and Shopaholic Regular for Shelley Long, Tom Hanks and The Money Pit — but the box on which I had placed the title and names made it look far more like a book cover than a film or DVD poster. I’ll tilt it, I thought. I tilted it but I still wasn’t happy.

Then I realised I could roughen the boundary edges of the box with one of Photoshop’s distort tools. I ended up using ZigZag. I liked it.

Final touches were the dollars and a DVD symbol from Wikimedia and that was it. It still looks more like a book cover to me but what the hell!

Click here for instructions if you would like to take part in future challenges.

Take care and keep laughing!