Aerobicide Poster
After watching the 1987 film Aerobicide (aka Killer Workout), I was so inspired that I letterpressed a poster for it.
The poster was printed on a Vandercook proofing press at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts. The forms for each of the four colors was laser cut and pressure printed, while the text at the bottom is wood type.
I made four prints total. One special edition one got gradient text, the rest have solid pink text
This was my second attempt at pressure printing, the first being the DNA Print poster. Pressure printing is a fun technique because you can easily print larger sizes prints using only paper, an x-acto (or laser cutter), and a glue stick. It also produces pretty nice results.
The plates and masks used for printing the four colors
The impression plate for the green circle
The end result turned out rather different than what I had originally designed on the computer, but that’s what keeps letterpress interesting (at least if you are not very good like yours truly.) It does look a little better in person too; photographing it was difficult.
Now if the poster has perchance piqued your curiosity in the film, be aware that, while I found the film to be a revelation, truly appreciating it does require a certain refinement of pop cultural sensibility. For while Aerobicide is perhaps lacking in plot and character development, and while perhaps a quarter of it is footage of women in leotards working out to SynthPop, and even though it perhaps may not be that great of a slasher film when judged by slasher film standards—which is to say: that while the movie is not a good movie in just about any objective sense—I’m telling you, when I watched it there at one in the morning in that unheated warehouse while printing the human genome, as those synths got pumping and Donna De Lory started belting Only You Tonight, I knew nirvana.