McCreary is managed by Joe Augustine, whom I met back when he was with Hybrid Records. Joe reached out to me a few years ago and asked me to design the soundtrack for the second season of Da Vinci's Demons. Of course, I said yes. From that point on, I began designing various covers for movie and TV scores created by McCreary.
Clean and simple minimalist logo design.
Child's Play is the latest reboot in a long line of Chucky horror movies. Bear worked his magic on this soundtrack using mostly children's toy instruments. I love the sound. I was provided with some wonderfully creepy stills from the movie to work with. I added some bloody texture in the background of the booklet that added some pops of red here and there.
Professor and the Madman is a movie about the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and how Professor James Murray compiled the words with the help of a patient from an asylum. The movie stars Mel Gibson and Sean Pean. Exciting to work on a project that starred these two legends. When I get these movie projects I'm presented with a Photoshop file of the movie poster and I need to reformat for jewel case proportions. This one was a challenge. Lots of layers that needed shifting and resizing.
If you were watching the superbowl in February of 2018, you saw the ad for this movie. I had been working on the design for the soundtrack under a promise to keep everything secret, though many elements surrounding the film remained a mystery even to me. I didn’t realize when and how it would be released until I saw that TV ad myself, which revealed that it would be available to stream on Netflix after the big game. Being a J.J. Abrams fan, this was an exciting project to work on and a fun one to put together. I got to utilize images we received from the film company in exciting ways.
Bear McCreary did the soundtrack for Unrest, an independent documentary film that aired at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. For this project, I wasn’t given many images to work with, but the ones that were supplied ended up working out beautifully.
Rebel in the Rye is a J.D. Salinger biopic that was written and directed by Danny Strong. I gave the art a vintage, smoked-filled, coffee-stained, up-all-night-writing, kind of vibe reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye.
10 Cloverfield Lane is the second film in the Cloverfield series, however the characters have no connection to those in the first film. Bear McCreary composed the music for this film as well, which stars John Goodman.
Another film for which Bear McCreary created the score, The Forest is a supernatural horror film. This album art was fun to pull together. I added some subtle grunge around the edges here and there to add to the mysterious vibe of the movie.
Every, starring Salma Hayek, is an homage to Japanese crime/Yakuza films. Bear McCreary composed the original motion picture soundtrack. I was given photos from the set and gave them a similar treat as the photo of Salma from the movie poster art. The high-contrast style lends itself well to the theme of the movie.
For season 3, I designed the booklet with a similar theme as I had for Season 2, with lots of weathered grunge and Da Vinci’s art here and there. The images from the film are great and were pretty fun to work with.
This was a quick project—no booklet, just a sleeve to hold the CD. I did a bit of photoshop work to get the cover art to work with the title treatment.
For this project, I only needed to design a booklet for iTunes. The artwork was all classic film strip art, which was fun to work with.
This was the first Bear McCreary project I worked on. It was a lot of fun to work with all of the Da Vinci art and amazing stills from the series for the first time.
John Hofstetter | stateofthedesign@gmail.com
