Empire Strikes Back- Record Storybook

Empire Strikes Back- Record Storybook

Post-Books

This is an image of a vinyl record of the OST for Empire Strikes Back. It features a gate-fold record sleeve and an interesting approach to it's book like folding aspect. Between the two sleeves holding the vinyl is a 15 page book outlining the movie. Looking at the way the images are place on the left page, it almost represents a storyboard telling the reader this is based on a film. Along with this formatting, the descriptions are placed below the images and remind me of captions for each scene. It is a different approach to the way this story is told and makes me feel like it is being narrated. Each page either has a few pictures from the movie and when read while listening to the soundtrack, feels like each page is its own chapter of the story. I believe this is why the designers of this mini storybook chose to either fill each page with one or a few images with a caption. This record was created in 1980 and speaks to Star Wars's cutting edge technology used to create the film by using high quality pictures and a unique way to tell a written/illustrated story with music. By creating this record, more people were able to experience the creativity of Star Wars by playing the record and following along with the book which included the same graphics and imagery as the movie. This book could only be created using new digital formatting technology that combines text with large images. The soundtrack is also instrumental making this easy to read while listening and giving you the same John Williams feel.

Comparing this piece to a normal story book, there are elements that are similar. Each page has a picture followed by text and is read from left to right. It also has short lines of text showing that this is something that could be read by children. One thing that differs from a storybook printed before this era is that these pictures could not be printed or created using a printing press. These images were created digitally using many colors and could only be printed using a multi-color printer to get a broad array of colors. Since this type of technology was available at the time, they probably printed the entire page at the same time along with the text although a traditional printing method could've been used to format the text. This contribution to vinyl records was important because it took an old style of story telling and combined it with film in a unique way. It also shows that combining pictures with captions of text can portray story similar to the way film does. It is easy to read and your eyes flow naturally from each picture with text to the next. The book has the same page turning function as a normal book would.

2/23/2020

CJ Falchi

Digital Image