Artwork of The Refo:mation

Julian Klettenberg sent me this piece, describing how he created the artwork for the Refo:mation album.

With regard to the artwork itself, Steve specified that he wanted something "really modern" and "fucked-up" (he liked the more way-out stuff I'd done for the Sounds of the Street "Unscarred" album - see my homepage at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~julienk/sots.html). He didn't want to have to go to any trouble for photos, however, so I ended up taking just head shots of Tim & Peter late one night in the main room at Karmic Hit. Owing to various technical fuck-ups (explainable and otherwise), it took three attempts to get Steve on film (is he really a vampire?). Steve was so set on making sure that the artwork was sufficiently strange, that he even asked if I could use the first set of photos (they were so over-exposed that he was almost unrecognisable). Anyway, the final photos were taken in the front room of Steve's Rozelle house (I used 2 different cameras, just to be on the safe side).

In order to get into the right frame of mind, whenever I worked on the cover, I had an unmastered version of the album playing in the background. This seemed to work well, and it was quite a thrill when both Peter & Tim declared that I'd really captured the spirit of the music in the cover. Remember, that the Refo:mation album is NOT just The Church minus Marty - it's a very different sound altogether!

The idea of the combined faces for the front image was born almost out of necessity - the band left it entirely up to me to come up with a front cover image and all I had was a collection of head shots that would go into the booklet itself. The front image is the result of digitally layering the three (finished) individual images one on top of the other. The back image was then created by twisting the front image and boosting the colour saturation (this image was also going to appear on the CD itself, but we were limited by budget constraints).

Oh yeah, I definitely like what you've done with the Refo:mation page in Shadow Cabinet - keep up the excellent work! I'm also getting a lot of hits on my page (I'm sure it's thanks to the Shadow Cabinet link).

regards

Julien.

Julien Klettenberg
Photography & Design

Ph: (61 2) 9327 5391
Fax: (61 2) 9326 1159
Mobile: 0412 476 727

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~julienk/

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