Empire Records - Rex Manning Day Poster - Looking for some help.

[Bandit959]

Hey Folks ...
I'm looking for a little help. I'm working on a post card sized version of the Rex Manning Album signing from Empire Records. I've checked the forums here and didn't find anything. And info in the web is kind of scarce. It seems that every screen cap that I take places the text in a slightly different positions. That's all easily solved but the big issue is the screen caps I take of Rex aren't good enough to get something workable even with Topaz's Gigpixel.

So .. my questions are
1) Does someone have access to higher res images that they don't mind sharing so that I can use them in the rebuild?
2) Is anyone aware of a program that enlarges images better than Gigapixel?
3) Does anyone know of a site that has some info that I haven't found?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[Bandit959]

Since the post cards are out and they have been showing up in mailboxes, I figured I'd follow up my post.

I'm a member of on Reddit's Random Acts of Cards sub and decided to offer a card for this year's Rex Manning Day. That's the day the "pop star" visited "Empire Records" to promote his album in the '95 movie Empire Records. (for the uninitiated)

Before the day, Empire Records would need get the word out about event And one way to do that in the 90's was to send post cards. So the post card I made would be part fiction/part poster replica to promote Rex's visit.

I made a bunch of screen caps and so I could rebuild the Rex poster in the movie in post card size. I found that there were 2 slightly different posters ... one on the door at Empire Records and another hanging near Rex. Based on the screen caps the best I could tell is each poster had other subtle differences from fonts sizes to dimensions to slightly different colors (although that could have just been the lighting) but you get the idea.

In the end, I ended up mashing the 2 poster layouts together to get a single post card. It leans more towards the larger of the 2 posters. Using some screen caps and Gigpixel, I did what I could to get clean images. Anything larger than a post card won't pass inspection. The font potions and head shot are slightly different in order to make room for yellow banner along the bottom (which comes from the second poster). When it came to the colors, there was a wide variation depending on the screen caps. I ended up choosing something that was in the middle and looked good on my printer.

The opposite side for would have all the information about Rex's appearance. I knew the date and time of the signing because it appeared in the movie. For a physical address, I used the address used in location shots. The layout is a combination of the different artist meet & greets used my local records stores ran (before COVID).

It's definitely not screen accurate but close enough to give the impression that it's a mailer the store could have used.

I posted on Reddit's Random Acts of Cards sub and got more requests than I expected. I was planning on 10, but ended up mailing out 42 in total.