The Shape of Water (Alexandre Desplat)


Guillermo del Toro continues his tradition of gorgeous films with excellent scores--here collaborating for the first time with French composer Alexandre Desplat. 2017's "The Shape of Water" flips the movie monster narrative on its head, by making the creature the romantic interest. Desplat creates a rolling and hypnotic orchestrations to capture the underwater drama, and two lyrical themes that support the new lovers. The film was a major winner on its Oscars night, taking home statues for best director, picture, and score.


The original soundtrack album features a nice enough cover using the key poster artwork, and the majority of the original score. With so much beautiful artwork available, however, I couldn't help playing around with a few alternates. The first uses this lovely drawing by James Jean. It was a little difficult to compose the text around this image, with no horizontal wiggle room. For the text, I tried to embrace the aesthetic one might find on a paperback romance novel, complete with gold embossed title.

The next image uses a still from the film itself, I simply had to continue the underwater texture for the top half of the image, add in some bubble effects, and comp in the light breaking through the top surface of the water. 

The third cover is fitted from Daniel Danger's incredible original Mondo print. I loved the vintage framed feel, but it took a while to isolate and cutout all the details around the trim to be able to them compose them around the new square crop, and I hope my edits don't intrude too much on the original art.

The fourth cover uses another mesmerizing alternate poster. This was actually the first poster I did for the series, so simply required finding the correct font, recreating the title and texture effects, and voila.

The final cover uses this incredible watercolor Chinese poster. I flipped the image, as it suited the composition and text better, imho. Simply trying to honor the minimal and elegant style of this stunning piece of art. 

Hope I did the music and art justice, and let me know which cover is your favorite in the comments.

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