Super 8: The Involvement!

When reading my bio, I’m pretty sure a lot of people have scratched their heads and thought: Wait a minute… Super 8?  If you’re new to my work then it’s likely the Super 8 connection seems unlikely or you remember the DC short by Peter Tomasi and Tommy Lee Edwards. But yes, my partner in comic crime Benjamin Read and I teamed up for the UK promotion of the film, we worked on a promotional website that had a bundle of Super 8 goodies.

The set up was to have an interactive desk of our hero Joe. On said desk is a comic entitled Monsters From The Morgue! Throughout the film the kids are making a horror movie and the comic is one inspiration for the kids when making their film.

We had a lot of fun working on this as we got to take it back to the 70’s and make a completely zany B movie short. So we were quite in our Sci-Fi element.

I have to say out of the whole project, the most fun I had was on the cover.

This had to look as authentic as possible. So we went for the heroic detective shielding the screaming dame. (Although this isn’t exactly how the interiors plot turns out) for reference we looked heavily at the covers from ‘Tales Of The Zombie’. Those covers often had a very beautiful painted style. I didn’t quite get the subtle beauty of those classics but it was a fun attempt. The cover lettering was custom made by Laura Trinder. She also worked on the fake retro advertisements and other bits outside of the website.

In the early stages of development we played with a few different ideas for the comic. One such route we tried, but sadly didn’t continue, was a sort of prequel short based around Charles himself.  Here are a couple of sketches done for that.

 

I’d also tried out my hand at some other bits for the desk interactions if you look through the desk you’ll find a storyboard sketchbook. This again was intended to be an item to back up the film the kids are making in the film. The intention was that one of the kids drew these rough storyboards. I think it’s plain to see from my version that I had a bit of trouble adapting my art style to look more like a youngster with not much art training. 

So again sadly these weren’t used but to be fair I hadn’t really met the authentic look!

People who will have watched the film will notice the story of these isn’t strictly what happens in the kid’s film. We were doing this purely from what we knew from the teaser trailer.

You can find the full website this work is on HERE