MINORITY REPORT

DreamWorks Records Los Angeles

Nobody wants to be the first person to hire you for anything new. They’d much rather you do another version of something that’s already in your portfolio. While I was working with Maverick Records I did a lot of bubbly pop music, so I got to work on S Club 7. I worked on one or two big name releases in the adult contemporary genre, so I got Sting and Whitney Houston. And I designed the soundtrack for The Matrix, which sold a gajillion units, so for a little while the soundtrack world was my oyster.

And what better pearl than a John Williams score for a Steven Spielberg sci-fi thriller starring Tom Cruise? As with The Matrix, I didn’t get to see the movie before designing the package, but this time I had the original Philip K. Dick story as a point of reference. On The Matrix I only had about a dozen images to work with. For Minority Report—I don’t want to give you a wrong number here, but I’m pretty sure I had five images total. Possibly six or seven. No more. All of those images were closeups of Tom Cruise, except for one. That one was a medium shot of Tom Cruise.

With music packaging I often had to do a lot with a little, but this was beyond my capabilities. I asked Lauren Nukes, the creative director at DreamWorks if she could get me more images. She relayed my request to her contacts at 20th Century Fox and was promptly shot down. Twice. I kept pushing, but Lauren told me that no further blood could be squeezed from this particular stone.

Luckily, a solution presented itself. Around this time Apple first started posting high definition movie trailers on their website, and wouldn’t you know it, the Minority Report trailer was among them. I downloaded the 1920 x 1080 pixel QuickTime movie, and got to work making screen captures.

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When I sent over the design, everybody was delighted. DreamWorks loved it, Fox loved it. They just had one quick question: Where were all these great stills coming from? I proudly told them that I had grabbed them all from the trailer.

And with that everybody went into panic mode.

Here’s the thing: All the images I had been given initially had been approved by the record company, by the studio, by all the agents. Knowing what I know now, I’m sure there had been all kinds of delicate negotiations. And now I had upset the balance of things. But hey, I told them, this had all come from the movie trailer. Which I had downloaded from a public website. None of it was secret. All of it had surely been vetted by all the key decision makers, right? Well, it wasn’t about that. It was more about the principle. But in the end, the package was approved without changes. Including the binary 344 next to Tom Cruise’s face.

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Making a virtue of insufficient resolution. “It’s a security camera shot. It’s supposed to be grainy.” Also note that only 2 of the 3 boxes sprout lines leading from the precogs to Tom. The third… why that’s the Minority Report. So clever I am!
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