At the end of every academic quarter, RIT's Film department has department screenings. It's one of the requirements of the various production classes that we show our works publicly to our peers and then talk and field comments about our films.

On a film I made during spring quarter 1997 (wherein I got hit by a car and broke my tailbone - I'll talk about it elsewhere) I decided that rather than have people start watching my film still thinking about the previous one, and possibly not getting the most out of it, I wanted a simple gag that most of the folks in the film department would get, and which would act as something of a spacer to get people thinking freshly about my film. I wanted to get in the first laugh before my film even properly began.

For those of you uncertain what the joke it, THX is a technical standard established by George Lucas' company, Lucasfilm - it dictates minimums for picture and sound quality in movie theaters and on home video. On lots of recent videos, you'll see the THX logo, indicating the picture and sound have been transferred with care, and at high quality.

The thing is, at RIT, we could only do so much with our work before it started degrading in quality. When we edited on our video decks, we were pretty much dubbing from one VCR to another. Keep in mind that, these are really high quality decks (SVHS, which is of higher resolution and fidelity than a regular VHS deck), but no matter how good your gear is, if you work in analog video the sad fact is that when you dub, your picture and sound degrade. When you consider that we might have to do five or six dubs back and forth to polish an assembly edit and then tack on titles and the like, you'll realize that sooner or later the picture takes a quality hit.

When you see the real THX logo, just as the sound of the mass of synthesizers climax, the words "Digitally Mastered" pop up. When the sound for the RITHX logo hits climax, you hear the sound break up, accompanied by the words "Completely Unmastered."

When the department saw this, they all cracked up. The actual film went over well too, so I was happy.

To create this picture, I first went to the THX website and got a reference image of their logo. Working from that, I then built the basic letter shapes in Neopaint. I did two versions of the letter shapes; one with the full outline (which would become the bevelled edges, and a thinner set that would represent the face of the letters. Importing both images into Photoshop, I developed my bevels, lassoing what I wanted and then airbrushing in the colors to get that chromed look. I then airbrushed the front faces, and the layers sit over each other perfectly, looking exactly like the real thing.