Once again, Gallery1988 asked me to participate in my favorite show of the year, Crazy4Cult. Having created homages to Army of Darkness, Clerks, and Aliens, (all in my top ten) I knew I had to select another cult favorite near and dear to my heart. So I chose to represent the Sci-fi Action Classic: Total Recall. Officially, my first movie mind-blow.

I watched it with my dad when it played on some kind of movie channel in the mid 90s. I was probably 10 or 11. I know it wasn't an edited version on USA or TBS or something because I specifically remember seeing a certain woman with a certain odd number of certain body parts. Although this character definitely made an impact on me, it was the plot that blew my mind. This was the first movie that didn't spoon-feed everything to me. It was great to experience a movie that confused me and made me wonder. I love that I still don't know whether it's all in Quaid's head or not. Throw that in with awesome Arnie action, killer practical effects, ancient aliens, a memorable score, a sweet title sequence... and uh, 90s Sharon Stone... and you've got yourself a movie.

Did I mention I was 11 and this movie was awesome?

DESIGN PROCESS

My goal was to create a poster that looks like an ad for the Rekall service! I really enjoy the commercial you see in the movie for Rekall, so I wanted to make something that would fit with those. The iconic Mars exploration scene in the beginning dream sequence seemed like a good place to start. I wanted the final result to be a little mysterious and reflect the sense of wonder I had when watching TR as a kid.

I scratched out a few compositions, trying to figure out the general shapes and structure of the ad. Ended up with the two figures, instead of just one. Made sure there would be good line pointing down to the logo/copy area of the design.

This started out as a pretty simple illustration, but as with a lot of my recent work, the texture got a bit out of hand. It may look subtle, but those textured vector gradients make the file huge. When I was prepping for print, I had to let one of the layers combine with the pathfinder tool overnight!