Close Encounters
The Close Encounters of the Third Kind motion picture came out a little early for me, actually one year before I was born, but it’s one of my favorite films. I like everything about it, but in general I like how Steven Spielberg and the producers of the film took the subject of UFOs and alien encounters and abduction seriously. There wasn’t anything camp or tongue in cheek about it. I’m not gonna go into a whole big thing about it, but all the movies involving extra terrestrial life that are on my favorite list are almost all there for that reason.
So I wanted to do a shirt about it, simply because I wanted to wear it, but I didn’t want to steal any frames or graphics directly from the movie, but rather use one of the ideas, so that if you saw the move you’d say “hey, I remember that” but it wasn’t a walking advertisement for the movie. That isn’t what the site is about and that just plain isn’t my thing. I want to do a design on the different levels of encounters, first, second, third, but I haven’t come up with anything good yet. My second idea was the hand gestures that they use to represent the different sounds and ultimately communicate with the aliens. If you play those notes anybody who has seen the film instantly knows what that is so I thought that’s a pretty good place to start. This time I didn’t sketch anything out. I watched the movie again to make sure I had the gestures in the right order, and I just photographed my own hands with my digital camera.
A photo of my own hand, in front of the wall in my office.
I didn’t know what exactly the final design was going to be, but I was thinking about technical manuals and instructions and the little line drawings they use when depicting people performing different functions, and I kind of imagined like a written instruction manual for communicating with aliens, but without the words. So the first thing I needed was line drawings of hands. My own hands were available and willing to work for free. After I had photographed the hands, and messed with the levels in Photoshop, I just bought them into Illustrator, put them on their own layers and locked them, and just started tracing whatever I felt was important.
The digital photo with the paths in Illustrator on top.
The biggest issue that I think came up was fingernail or no fingernail. That’s a road everybody has to walk down and some time or another, but I went with fingernail this time. Those line drawings of people often times don’t have color to them to save money on printing, so I didn’t add any color to mine either. As you can see my arm just cuts off at the edge of the photo, and I wanted the arm in there, so I needed to enclose the hands somehow so that they framed the subject matter, and made you think mayber there was the rest of the dude standing just beyond. It was either a square or a circle, and I went with circles just cause it reminded me of Chipotle.
The finished design.
