News
THE NIGHT CLEANERS POSTER BROADSHEET
21 May 2019
Every now and then we get a most unusual and interesting knock on the Jealous Studio door. Seven years or so ago it was bookseller Jake Fior who had discovered an extremely rare Alice in Wonderland chessboard handpainted by John Tenniel (the Victorian illustrator of the ‘Alice’ first editions). Jake asked us to help create a limited edition of fine reproductions of the chessboard. A number of other expert craftspeople were involved, including Kate Hepburn who hand water-coloured our silk screens of the Tenniel illustrations. In 2014 Kate came knocking on the door again with an equally fascinating project she was working on with Nick Mason of Pink Floyd fame, who wanted to recreate the iconic painted drumskins he used at concerts across the globe in the 70s in the form of hand finished silkscreens onto the drumskins themselves. Kate, who headed the project, was also one of the artists who painted these skins, all of which, once completed, were auctioned for various charities which Nick Mason supports.
This year Kate returned to Jealous Studios with yet another exciting and inspiring project, here she tells us more…
“The original poster was commissioned by The Berwick Street Film Collective in support of The Night Cleaners Campaign in the 1970’s. It was designed and printed using letterpress on newsprint paper with Ken Campbell on a college press. The long diagonal texts are ‘timelines’ referring to people, meetings, demonstrations, leafleting and filming.
One of the few remaining copies of the poster was scanned for archive reasons and being inspired by the events of last year, I had the idea of reproducing full size copies of the poster. A newly re-mastered version of their film '36 to '77 was screened at the BFI SouthBank in 2018. Also, there would be a launch for the full DVD and Blu-ray versions as box sets, by Raven Row and the publication of a new book of essays and source documents covering the two films.
Having met Alex Sainsbury at the BFI I suggested Jealous would be able to print a very exact version and he commissioned me to print a few posters to display at his launch. I decided to design a broadsheet version of the poster that I could give away at the event. On the reverse side of the poster, pages could be sequenced from a book design layout I had made at the time, as part of a funding proposal to the BFI.
A high resolution scan of the original poster was excellently done by Passion Print on a 1000mm wide Colour Track Scanner. Swinging the contrast and levels in Photoshop I also created a second version with a black background. As the book dummy had 24 pages, I could fit them into an exact 6 x 4 sequence on the back of the poster, folding up from A1 into a broadsheet. With patience on the part of Adam finding a paper matching the newsprint effect and weight, but heavy enough to prevent transparency and to pass though Jealous’ Epson SureColor P9000printer. This was followed by great perseverance from Sophie to achieve an accurate match up of the two sides.
All are very appreciative of the second edition of this Night Cleaners Poster and the broadsheet version - thank you Jealous.”
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