This was an interior illustration for one of the Fall '99 RIT film department screenings booklets. Tom Vullo and I decided it would be nice to have at least one thing within each day's book to act as kind of a diversion - something fun and happy to come across when you got bored. The first day, Tom wrote a cartoon and I illustrated it. The second day, we couldn't come up with something. For the third day, I decided to do a fake tribute/advertisement of the sort you'd see in a film trade magazine.

I've always thought it's funny that while just about every other media puts disclamers or outright messages against smoking into their advertisements, movies and television feature tons of smoking without a single word of warning. Take a critical look at films - a significant portion of characters smoke... usually at least one character in each film. Smoke does have the virtue of adding atmosphere to a scene - backlit smoke looks wonderful in a shot, and just a general ambient quantity of smoke will add depth to shot. Also, smoking can say a lot about a character.

One last thing: In the early days of cinema, film had a different chemical construction. Film stock back then was very flammable (which is why safety stock was introduced in the early 50's), and countless early films have been lost to the ages because they caught fire. I thought it was a nice irony.

To create the image, I thought initially of gathering images online. I spent a number of hours looking for a good picture of a film reel, but came up empty. I did find useful reference images of the Kodak logo and the American Film Institute logo, but I ultimately chose to create everything else from scratch. Working in Photoshop, I first made the spotlight with the Lighting Effects filter. The pool of light on the ground was just a filled ellipse that I softened the edges of. Then, it was time to create the film reel, which is five or six layers deep. In comparision with the cigarette pack, though, it was a walk in the park; trying to create the look of that inner foil bag within the pack was tough. When I still wasn't happy with what I considered to be my best effort, I made a merged copy of the foil and applied the "Craquelure" filter to it. By fading the effected version over the original version, I was finally able to get a foil look I liked. After that, I pasted in the 2 logos, enlarging them and then tracing over them to create higher-resolution versions. Then I was basically done.

While previously I had to take the photocopier I'd be using into account when I designed my images, The film department had obtained a much better machine over the summer. I took complete advantage of that fact, so this is fairly grey-heavy. It copied fantastically, and it went over quite well. A lot of people asked me if this had, in fact, been created in a 3D program. I think that's a compliment.