40 Years: The Music of Superman
Part III: Online Promotion
Client: La-La Land Records, 2019
This final look at the making of La-La Land Records's limited edition soundtracks for Superman: The Movie and its three sequels will examine the promotional push behind each album.
Marketing and outreach to the film score fan community is now channeled almost exclusively through social feeds and message boards. When a new album is announced by a label, the press release includes certain information about what to expect from the release (audio quality, restoration facts, run time, etc), but official track listings are usually not available until the day of release and online ordering begins. The below graphics were produced to accompany these announcements to help promote and tease the forthcoming release -- without revealing too many specifics.
Each graphic was created in two formats to meet the technical requirements of the social channel. Generally, Facebook and Twitter prefer a 1:2 "widescreen" ratio, with a square for Instagram.
Since these graphics are usually produced before the album itself has been manufactured, production begins with a photo of blank cases, booklets, and discs. The product set-up is then cut out, and a detailed, scene-specific environment will be built around it digitally. I'll sketch out different ideas for what I'm thinking will push the fond memories button with fans, but the choice of environment typically is decided by what can be pulled off best. Sometimes a graphic is produced and discarded, as was the case with example below, which felt too similar to a graphic produced to market a Superman blu-ray set a few years prior.
For Superman The Movie, I settled on the spacecraft landing in Kansas, and ended up using everything from stock photography, press kit stills, set photos and freeze-frames (shown below) to fill out the environment.
From these shots, I may take just a bit of a flame or a puff a smoke as needed to make the environment as believable as possible -- or as director Richard Donner would describe it, "verisimilitude." Below is a short, step-by-step video showing how the product photo was built up, layer by layer.
One of the bigger set-pieces in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, involved a slo-mo fight on the moon between Christopher Reeve's Superman and the hilarious 1980s villainy of the Nuclear Man, which largely consisted of ol' frosted hair trying to scratch Supes with his silver-painted, poisonous, electrified nails. So, yeah...there was no way I wasn't including those hands in the environmental product shot.
In the case of Superman: The Movie, additional graphics like this mock headline for the Daily Planet were also produced to coincide with the release announcement.
