A Spanish drama directed by Carlos Sedes, "El Verano Que Vivimos" tells a story of journalistic intrigue and romance. At this time, the film has not had any foreign distribution, but it did premiere in Spain at the end of 2020. Scoring the project is Argentinian composer Federico Jusid, who splits his time between productions in Madrid and L.A., especially known as being the king of the Iberian period drama. Though I don't know much about the film it scores, Jusid's music here, as is usually the case with this masterful composer, is a lush, thematic, orchestral powerhouse, full of passion and yearning, and is one of the best dramatic scores of the year.
I certainly don't have the usual connection here I have to my previous projects, as I know little of the film, but the music is gorgeous, and Jusid certainly deserves much more appreciation by the wider cinematic and musical community. Originally, this just started as a one-off alternate cover for my private collection to replace the fairly lackluster official album cover. Overall though, I dug the old-fashioned romantic nature of the poster art, all bathed in nostalgic golden-hour warmth--I just couldn't resist whipping up a quick set of covers to do Jusid's music justice.
Also, since the film hasn't received any foreign distribution, to my knowledge, and doesn't even have an official English translation yet, I ended up just keeping all the text in Spanish, which was a nice change for once.
The first cover is my remake of the official cover. Multiple strikes against this art: 1) having the actors' names plastered on the cover (on a poster, sure, on a soundtrack cover--no), 2) the text treatment at the top is just dull (I took the design idea, but improved it), 3) the art itself was weirdly low quality even at full size, and 4) why the heck does the album feature the film's tagline? All instant 'no-no's' in my book. The text was easy enough to adjust, and I simply had to patch together a few a better poster and a still of the same scene to get better image quality, then compress down the sky to so as to not awkwardly chop out the bottom half of the image.
Cover 2 is again a simple edit of a different poster design. Love the use of the Iberian plains in these images. With such an open image like this, it's easy to just crunch down the sky to keep more of the image below, though I still cropped the bottom a bit since I was keeping all the text up top.
The third cover took the most work. Again, using a different poster, presumably there's some sort of love triangle going on here. The original poster though would be uncomfortably tight when cropped into a square format, but I luckily found the official production still that this poster was clearly created from, which allowed me to widen out the image a bit more (though it looked even better in full landscape width). Just had do multiple adjustments to make the still match the look of the more-stylized final poster, blend, etc.
Cover 4 again, relatively simple, just tightened the sky vertically to give a nice frame.
Pretty simple overall, just took two or three days to finish these off, and artwork this beautiful is always a pleasure to work with, and tonally a very different look than you normally see from modern Hollywood blockbusters, especially a nice contrast to my previous 'WW84' covers. Hope you enjoy, and I'm happy to give the spotlight to an incredibly talented composer who deserves a much bigger spotlight, so I hope you'll check out his work, if you're unfamiliar.
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