My latest album project is the soundtrack release for John Barry’s (mostly unused) score to the 1977 film, First Love, released today by La-La Land Records. In this particular instance, I handled the art direction. This film is probably best known as “the film where Susan Dey takes it all off”, and it was surprising to discover that Paramount Pictures didn’t even have it listed in their online asset system.
This resulted in some manual work, where the lovely folks in archives were able to find all the photo assets, scan in a contact sheet for me, and we selected the photos we wanted them to use. Interestingly, the key art assets didn’t have the actual poster version of the title treatment; instead they had some generic type treatment that didn’t really feel like it would work with the aesthetics I wanted to go with for the album package.
Luckily, the Internet was a great help, and I was able to track down a relatively high-resolution piece of art that would allow me to use it as a basis to recreate the key art title treatment in Adobe Illustrator. Once that was done, it was relatively easy to put the package together, making sure to put a delightful photo beneath the disc (on the inner tray card) and per producer Neil S. Bulk’s request, a lovely picture of Susan Dey and William Kat in flagrante delicto below his name in the booklet. You can preview the artwork here.