Nine Inch Nails: The Fight Club Soundtrack [What If?]

In an alternate universe, this would exist –

Think about it – there’s a line of dialogue in David Fincher’s Fight Club (one of my all-time favourite movies), where the Narrator (Edward Norton’s character) says, “With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.” One of the songs from “Hesitation Marks”, the latest album from Nine Inch Nails, is called “Copy of A”. When I heard this song, the first thing that came into my mind was Fight Club.

The 2005 song “Only”, by NIN, from their album “With Teeth” also could be considered to have reference to Fight Club in the lyrics [SPOILER ALERT] – “I just made you up, to hurt myself” / “There is no you, there is only me.” The music video for “Only” was directed by David Fincher.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails would go on to create the soundtracks for two of David Fincher’s movies – The Social Network (2010) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).

Therefore, there definitely must be an alternate universe somewhere, where the soundtrack for Fight Club was done by Nine Inch Nails and not by The Dust Brothers! Above, is my representation of what that album cover would look like. There’s Edward Norton and Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden from the movie, and in the centre, is Trent Reznor, the frontman of Nine Inch Nails.

I had this idea today while listening to “Copy of A”, and I proceeded to draw this in a gel pen on paper, and then scanned it in and added some paper texture and the text. The text is in the font Reznor: Downward Spiral.

Reference images – Edward Norton is from a screenshot from the movie itself, Brad Pitt is from a publicity still, and Trent Reznor is from the recent Rolling Stone Magazine cover. The Fight Club lettering on top is my hand-drawn imitation of the font Mrs Eaves Bold Italic.

Above are a couple of Instagram / Snapseed edits of in-progress photos of the drawing. Edit of a photo of a drawing – that’s also a copy of a copy of a copy, isn’t it?

Here is a shot of the notebook page (A4 size) with the pen I used to draw it –

The “Paper Street Record Co.” is a reference to the “Paper Street Soap Company”, Tyler Durden’s soap-making outfit.

You can listen to the entire album “Hesitation Marks” here. Below, I’ve embedded YouTube videos of the songs that inspired this drawing.

Nine Inch Nails / “Copy of A” –

Nine Inch Nails / “Only” –

Four Panorama Photos

Posted on 31-Aug-13 by Karthik Abhiram

Here are four panorama photos I took recently. First the pictures, then the behind the scenes stuff will follow.

That’s a shot of Cyber Towers at Madhapur, Hyderabad.

This is a picture of the building under construction opposite Cyber Towers.

Road near Shenoy Nursing Home, close to home.

Took this while waiting for a haircut on a Sunday (hence all shutters down) afternoon.

These were taken with my Micromax Canvas HD phone. Which app, you may ask, since though the Canvas HD has Jelly Bean 4.1, its camera does not have a Panorama function. However, there exists a way to install the stock Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean Camera app on a phone running Ice Cream Sandwich or later.

You can find more information at this Lifehacker post. I downloaded the APK file and installed it on my phone. It adds another Camera and Gallery app to my phone. If I use the new app, I can take panorama photos. The Photosphere feature doesn’t work on my phone though.

I took these panorama photos and edited them in Snapseed. The panorama shots are low resolution ones though (about 1500 x 600 pixels). But for posting on Facebook or here, that’s OK.

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Dramatic Skies in B&W – Behind the Scenes

Posted on 31-Aug-13 by Karthik Abhiram

I posted the below photo on my Instagram feed yesterday, and people seemed to like it, so I thought I’d do a little behind the scenes post.

That’s the dramatic black and white sky photo. The photo was taken yesterday afternoon while I went out for lunch (that’s the advantage of going out everyday) on my Micromax Canvas HD phone.

The original image is rather dull and uninteresting as it is –

I took it into Snapseed and straightened it. Initially, I thought I’d include the electrical wire as a straight line in the final photo. But after straightening, when I was trying to work out a crop that looked good, I decided to do away with the wire and just focus on the sky.

I applied the “Drama” filter in Snapseed and then boosted saturation. That resulted in the below image, which is a bit more visually interesting than the original –

But this looks kind of overcooked and garish. I thought I’d play with the colours to tone it down a bit and then post. But then, I decided to try a black and white conversion. Snapseed has a nice set of options for converting a photo into B&W.

In Snapseed you can simulate putting a colour filter in front of the lens when taking a B&W photo. If you’re shooting on B&W film, putting a red, yellow or orange semi-transparent filter in front of the lens has the effect of darkening the sky. Basically, anything that’s blue will get darkened.

That’s a sample screenshot of applying the filter. (It’s being applied to another panorama photo I took yesterday.)

So here I saturated the image further since I knew the more blue that’s present in the image, the darker the sky would be. I think I used an orange filter for the final image. Tweaked the contrast and brightness a little, added some grain, and there you have it.

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Selected Photos from 9-Aug-13

Posted on 10-Aug-13 by Karthik Abhiram

Sharing a selected set of photos from yesterday –

A shot from a window, converted to Black and White with Snapseed’s Red filter, to enhance the skies.

A turtle (maybe teenage, most likely not a mutant, definitely not a ninja). Went to Eat 3 for lunch yesterday, took this picture there.

The street near home was lit up for Bonalu festival. I stood in the middle of the road to get this shot.

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Karthik Abhiram | Photographer, Artist and Instagrammer from Hyderabad, India

Tag Archives: Snapseed

Nine Inch Nails: The Fight Club Soundtrack [What If?]

Four Panorama Photos

Dramatic Skies in B&W – Behind the Scenes

Selected Photos from 9-Aug-13