Before I even began designing the reverse card design for the 1st place card, I had what I thought was a perfect design in mind and knew exactly what I wanted. I even spent the night before finding the right reference images and mentally piecing together the design.
The image of a Wild West hero riding off into a dramatic sunset after completing his mission is so elegiac: so symbolic of the Western that it’s no wonder why people automatically see that spectacle and think of the genre.
In my opinion, there are few scenes or aspects of a Western better than the image of the hero riding off into a dramatic sunset.
I wanted to make the sunset look as dramatic and authentic as I could, so I drew inspiration from both the ending scene to Gore Verbinski’s astounding and charismatic Western Rango and the ending scene to the official music video of violinist Lindsey Stirling’s Roundtable Rival.
Both these images would provide me the best references for the scene, with the Roundtable Rival image providing the frontier town and the Rango screenshot giving me a perfect sunset reference.
I humbly consider Rango a masterpiece and one of the greatest Westerns ever made. Few Westerns have so much charm and symbolism and the ability to be both humorous and deliver profound messages through fantastic storytelling: cutting to the very heart of what the Western is truly about with both ease and character. Everything from the cinematography to the music to the character design makes this film scripture to Wild West aficionados like myself. Sure, it breaks character sometimes but it is forgiven, oh Lord above is it forgiven.
Above anything else, films like Rango prove that there is still mileage and hope for the most well-worn on genres, and that there is still an audience for a genre that the modern world pronounces ‘dead’.
It is not dead. There are still those out there who feel alive every time they hear an Ennio Morricone score, or witness the heroic acts of a nameless strange man as he fights injustice with a six gun by his side.
And that is why I wanted to feature the sunset from this film, so that I could honour Verbinski and the other amazing people who worked on this film, which means a lot to me. They must have felt the same way I do, if they can create something as authentic as this.
Originally, the design was going to feature the silhouette of a few buildings of a frontier town set in front of the sunset, adding another bit of iconography to the whole scene, but after working on a good bit of the sunset and placing the buildings in, I found that they obscured too much of the sunset for my liking. I had already put so much heart, soul and time into getting the sunset perfect, that I decided to get rid of the town idea altogether and settled instead for having just a silhouette of a cowboy riding off into the distance.
I had the same problem with the logo: far too much of the sunset was hidden from view when I put the sign in. So, thinking quickly, I got a duplicate of the logo, cut all the words out and put them on the card instead. This way, 90% of the sunset could be seen, and its beauty could remain intact.
Obviously, I wanted the sunset to be seen as much as it could, and I believe that I made the right choices by removing the buildings and most of the logo.
I think it is perfect!
