This was the cover to one day of the 1998 RIT Winter Screenings' schedule booklet (Monday). I wanted to cleverly alter some product, and make it relevant to the screenings, but I was kind of stumped. My friend Heath, had an idea... however some background on Heath may be in order:

Heath loves Taco Bell. In college, he ate there maybe 10 times a week...when he was busy. More if he wasn't so busy. At the house we rented in college, Heath had one deep drawer in the kitchen filled top to bottom with Taco Bell hot sauce packets.

Heath suggested altering a hot sauce packet.

I liked the idea, but Taco Bell's hot sauce packs have a too dark a background - in black and white, red becomes black, and the rich orange of the hot sauce packet wouldn't reproduce well on the photocopiers at school. Instead, I used a mild sauce pack (an orange that's one step away from being yellow), importing it onto Photoshop on another housemate's flatbed scanner. First thing I did was, on a new layer, obliterate all the text and symbolic elements that had been printed on the packet, leaving me with basically a blank template. Then I copied the original image onto a new layer, and broke it down into all the individual letters that had been printed on the packet, so that I had a whole bunch of building blocks. Using these blocks, and pieces thereof, I built the word "Winter Screenings" out of bits of the letters that initially spelled "Border Sauce." The entire ingredients block is from discrete letters taken from the packet's original ingredients paragraph. The iconic videotape and small film reel in the upper black box were hand-drawn in pen and ink in the style of the sun and chili pepper on the real packet, then scanned it into Photoshop with my old Logitech hand scanner. That's basically it.