I've been diving into the world of custom VHS tapes - there's something incredibly satisfying about taking one of your favorite movies and creating your own custom slipcase and artwork for it. I fell down the rabbit hole when I discovered @coffinvideo1983, @deadmediajunkies and @brainbustervid. (check them out for some rad physical media!)
I set about learning how to clean tapes (thanks to this LunchMeat tutorial) as I found out the copy of The Shining I had picked up at a garage sale that I was going to use (surprise surprise) had some light specks of mold in the reels. Unfortunately, just cleaning the tape itself didn't do the trick, I had to continue onto part 2, which is a lot more involved and requires you to take the shell completely apart, remove the original reels, cut the magnetic tape, and swap the reels for "freshy fresh" ones. My first try took several hours, but I managed to save my copy of The Shining, and now have the ability to swap reels into any shell, which means you can go from this boring black thing to something really fun - like these orange and blue cases!
I had an idea to do a design for "In the Mouth of Madness" to mimic the look of a vintage horror paperback book from the 80s/90s. I wanted the tape to look like the book version that Sutter Cane wrote, complete with the first couple pages, including blurbs, the title page, and the 1st page of the "novel," which I used the 1st page of the movie script for. Floating around the internet are book props that were used for the movie, so that's where I got my reference images from. Unfortunately, none of them were hi-res enough, or straight on shots, so I did my best to recreate them from scratch in Photoshop, including the front and back cover, spine (complete with a weathered texture) and the first few interior pages.
I started in Photoshop and made my own blank template for the slipcase, which is also free for anyone to grab and use for themself - link is here, so go grab it! (you will need Photoshop to open & edit) I've split the slipcover design across 2 artboards, both sized at 8.5x11, so they can be printed on regular sized printer paper.
"Chapter 1" is the first page of the movie script, this will be the front of the slipcover box when assembled. The 2nd image is the back, mocked up to look like the back of Sutter Cane's book - and the edges have a page texture to look like the yellowed pages in a book when shut.
Next I printed out all the pieces very low quality in b&w on thin paper to do my mock-up. I went through quite a bit of paper trying to get the inserts laid out correctly - you can see all my attempts above!
Once I finally got the placement correct, I printed everything out again on glossy photo paper at the highest quality. The 1st image are the pages that will go inside, mimicking the book, the middle image is all the pieces laid out, and the last is the front cover that will attach to the slipcover.
Here you can see all the pieces that make up the slipcover. Back, front and cover.
Then it was a matter of glueing everything together! I used a combination of disappearing gluestick along with double-sided 3M tape in sections. I recorded the movie onto a blue cassette (which is an entirely different post and drawn-out process on its own) and applied labels that were printed out on glossy sticker paper.
It's a book! It's a movie! It's a book made into a movie! AAAAAAHHHHHH! (I feel you Sam Neill - those are my sentiments when I have to ride the bus, too.)