I Can Read Breaking Away

I Can Read Breaking Away

For the I Can Read Movies DS106 Design assignment, I created a cover for one of my all time favorite films, Breaking Away. If you haven’t seen the film it’s the story of four friends after high school that grew up in a college town, not feeling they were ever to go themselves. Their families all have some connection to the old Indiana limestone industry, usually as stone cutters, but the business has gone. So the local kids are derogatorily called “cutters” by the college kids and tension ensues. One of the cutters, Dave, finds escape through cycling and dreams of riding for the Italian team Cinzano. For most of the film he basically feigns an Italian accent and listens to opera – which makes for a great soundtrack actually.

This cover captures the moment when Dave drafts off a truck going down the highway. Hopefully the embed below works, as it’s my first time trying to embed from movieclips.com (lot’s of crappy unnecessary code in there).

The tractor trailer truck was a full size truck, but I wasn’t able to make it fit in the cover design. I like it a lot though and hope to find a way to use it at another time.

And this is the cyclist (possibly Lance?) and the book cover texture I can’t seem to find again. I didn’t want to use the cover templates others had done, and tried to make it from scratch to push myself to do something different in Photoshop. I could figure out how to do surface scratches, especially in dark areas revealing bits of white. I’ll have to work on that as I’m not 100% happy about it.