Series 5 starts with an idea from the Godfathers of BTSNAT and I drew inspiration from BTSjunkie’s wall. This time we were going small from the monumental posters that we did for BTSN4T’s Arctic Blast poster signed by Brian Trenchard-Smith. Is this the end? It all has to end sometime, right?
I was given the title “BTSNAT 5: The Final Nightmare” to work with and told that the Godfathers wanted badges. I took it a step further though and also made booklets detailing the history of BTSNAT. The badges and booklets are the size that you would get at any local film festival. Each booklet is 16 pages with a spread for each BTSNAT as well as a spread for the Godfathers, a list of gifts from each, and a notes page. The back page was the hardest, but I will get to that later.
Phase 0
Soliciting the help of my lady friend, Dshanya, I covertly planned for the possible showing of my movie choice. Since names are drawn from a hat there is no telling if I’ll make it in this time. I didn’t last time. The movie I’ve chosen I found just 1 day after the last BTSNAT in December 2011 and I kid you not is about an Art Historian with epic facial hair. Since I will release this page during the event I will leave it at that.
Inspiration
Inspiration this time has nothing to do with the final movie except that they are both directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith. BTSjunkie has a rather large Escape 2000 (aka Turkey Shoot) poster hanging in his living room that has a great 1980’s computer feel to it that has this great horizon line and font. So I went from there researching all the elements I needed.
Phase 1 – Booklets
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Paper
I used this really cool paper that I love so much that I am glad I finally got an opportunity to use it for a really cool purpose. It sort of like magazine paper so it’s got this great shine, feel, and weight to it. The colors look amazing on it too.
Cover
It’s the basic badge design, but with the film strip going down the middle. It includes the title, date, and location.
Spread 1: Godfathers
I didn’t plan the pictures to be like that and I didn’t even notice until I printed that each of the 4 were making similar faces. I could have changed them easily, but I decided that it was a good way to go with the booklet.
Spread 2: BTSNAT 1
I know it’s plain. I don’t know that the Godfathers ever thought it would come this far.
Spread 3: BTSNAT 2: Buddies Forever
The first thing I ever had to do with BTSNAT was helping BTSjunkie and Noah with the Buddies Forever gift-bags. BTSjunkie brought his image and we made the bags happen.
Spread 4: BTSNAT 2.5: BTS Bandits
BTSjunkie, ReelDistraction, and ZombieFreak handed full control to Noah and I and we came up with BTS Bandits. We made 2 sided t-shirts in my art room that included a modified logo from the Brian Trenchard-Smith movie BMX Bandits.
Spread 5: BTSN4T: Arctic Blast
After the success of the BTS Bandits t-shirt I wanted to go big and multi-colored, but I needed help. With the permission of the Godfathers I got Leiabox to help me put together a great screen printed poster. But in the background I lurked sending Facebook messages to Brian Trenchard-Smith who was more than willing to help us out and put the wool over the eyes of BTSjunkie, ReelDistraction, and ZombieFreak. After the posters were completed I shipped the posters to BTS to sign and send back. Needless to say attendees were amazed and it made an excellent Brianmas present fro BTSjunkie.
Spread 6: BTSNAT 5: The Final Nightmare
Full color background with numbers ready to be filled in by attendees!
Spread 7: Gifts & Notes
Listings of all previous gifts attendees have received and space for notes.
Back: Ads
All fake, but based in some sort of reality. This was probably the toughest part of the project, fake stuff is fake and hard.
IPA Your Face Brewing – Reference to ReelDistraction
Rewind This VHS Video Store – Reference to the documentary Leiabox, ThinkZombie, and VHSisthetruth are working on
BMX Repair – Reference to BMX Bandits
Dome Polish – Reference to BTSjunkie
Pot of Gold Casino – Reference to Leprechaun 3
BTS Trailers from Hell – Reference to BTS
DJ Wanted – Reference to Noahphex
Firebase Gloria Pizza Place – Reference to The Siege of Firebase Gloria
Poster Art Retrospective – We all love posters. Am I right?
Stunt Person Wanted – Reference to Stunt Rock
Zombie Juice – Reference to ZombieFreak
Solar Eclipse Protection – Reference to Arctic Blast
Each of the pages for every booklet were cut individually by me and then stapled by hand.
Phase 2 – Purchasing
Phase 2 just ended this week on 6/5/2012. It was hard because I drew all the resources I could. But research started at the beginning of April, so this does really take months of planning to complete. When all is said and done the whole planning process takes about 3 months. So basically half of the year I am working on BTSNAT related ideas, art, and planning. I will say that Amazon Prime was a lifesaver this time. We saved so much in shipping.
I wanted to do all the printing (minus transparencies) in house. My laser printer needed serious upgrading in the form of more toner cartridges, new drum kit and fuser. This came out to be a little over $500!! It was cheaper to just buy a new laser printer in the end, but I am so glad that we did because of the amazing images I got out of the contraption. Instead of being a regular laser printer that uses mirrors to fuse the toner on to the paper it uses LED technology to do it. There are no moving parts like in a regular laser printer so it is also an energy saver and will be less likely to break down. I did have to wait weeks for it to arrive though, so I am glad we got started when we did.
Badge holders and t-shirts were the worst to order. I was ready to pull my hair out when all was said and done. Getting festival badge holders in a quantity of 15 is the hardest thing on the planet to track down. The original shirts we wanted were American Apparel on the suggestion of Justin Ishmael at Mondo. I would have loved to use them too, but we were too late in getting all the t-shirt sizes that we needed and ended up going with Hanes.
Justin Ishmael from Mondo @ Alamo Village Screening of Chronicle
Lanyards and security stickers were easy. I was very happy with the color of the green lanyards it will make the green of the computer font really pop. And to make the badges really authentic we decided to get security stickers.
Last but not least screen printing ink. This is going to be the toughy. Printing is the last phase of the project and I have 2 colors to choose from, but they are sort of the same color… green. One is a glo in the dark the other is just regular old kelly green. It will require some testing to really decide on which color we will eventually go with in the end.
Phase 3 – Badges
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Once I received everyone’s information including a picture everything went like clockwork. I was so happy when the booklets fit perfectly into the badge holder with the badge inside. The lanyards are a perfect match. I really hope that the t-shirts turn out as well as the badges. I was very pleased with the variety of pictures I received.
BTSjunkie – Zombie
ReelDistraction – VHS fort
zombiefreak – Adorable cowboy
Noahphex – Beerface
LolaReels – 1980’s glasses with cake
Sleestakk – Kinda looks like a serial killer
leiabox – Extreme closeup
ThinkZombie – Lomolounge
VHSisthetruth – B/W profile
ldmullen – Adorable nerd
BriguySalisbury – Adorable ball pit
javifuentes – Shakeyface
jenerator – Detroit Drop Bass
Phase 4 – T-shirts
Quite frankly the I have t-shirt making down to a science. The hardest part is choosing colors, as mentioned above. After liberating a screen from it’s frame I started stretching a screen, which I also have down to an artform. The people at Jerry’s Art-a-rama suggested that when I bought regular green and night-glo green that I might want to try and mix the colors to try to get some crazy effect. So I found an old t-shirt to run some tests on to figure out exactly what Noah and I were going to do ink wise. On an old screen I swirled the two colors on the left side. In the middle I put just some plain old night-glo and on the right regular green. I pulled the ink and pretty much my choice was made for us when we lifted the screen, but we waited for it to dry a little bit. Turns out night-glo is brighter on black than regular green, even in the daylight. Plus it looks really cool in a dark room.
So in a relatively dim room I applied a thin layer of photo emulsion to the screen and stuck it in the guest bath with an fan to dry. Once dry I expose the screen with positive transparencies held in place by a pane of glass to a 150Watt clear light for 45min. This is the science part. Because of the glass and the strength of the light bulbs I only directly expose the screen to about 5minutes during the 45minute time-span, because it will burn the emulsion under the transparencies and render the screen unusable. The bulb is 12inches from the screen itself and I place the screen on top of some black foamcore. Every 5minutes I move the screen with the bulbs center on the frame itself giving indirect light to the photo process, but still giving complete coverage of light to the entire screen. Because I’ve made so many screens in various sizes I have hooks in my art room ceiling that I can hang 2 lights from for exposing screens. It just takes a ruler and a little bit of patience. Once the exposure is done I run back to the bathroom and rinse out the screen.
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Because of tape around the edges of the glass I have to do a little extra work filling in the screens with screen filler. It’s just like painting a textured wall, just filling in holes where you don’t want ink to go through. You wait for the filler to dry and viola you are ready to print!
Noah helped with the printing, which took about 30minutes. It will take longer to heat seal each shirt to lock in the color to the shirt.
Phase 5 – PS3 Background
Since BTSBandits I’ve been making PS3 Backgrounds for the festival. It does present some challenges due to the size ratios, but they have always turned out great and they really get people into the mood.
