Deathrace 2000

How can you not love the movie Deathrace 2000?    With David Carradine as Frankenstein and Sly Stalone as Machine-Gun Joe, the movie follows a road race across a post-apocalyptic America.

As the name implies, you get points for running over people. The movie inspired one of the best racing games ever; Carmageddon. In fact, while my wife was in labor with our first child, I was at home playing Carmageddon. (I make it back to the hospital in time...)

A friend once made me a Deathrace 2000 scorecard for the visor of my car. It had all the point breakdowns with some funky graphics he copied from the movie. Thus, the Deathrace2000 wallpaper was born.



The screencap. Yes, seniors really are worth 100 points. Before you start sending the hate mail, remember this is satire... Besides, they're pretty crafty.



The screencap resized to 1280 x 1024. With this as a template, I'll add layers for the center graphic, the blue lines and each color of text. One last layer will be for the wavy text at the bottom.




For the center graphic I used the select tools, then stroked the selection with the 'Circle Fuzzy (25)' brush in white.




Not bad; now I'll clean it up a bit by stoking single line paths with the pencil 'Circle Fuzzy (19) in white... Further cleanup with the clone brush is followed by cranking the contrast up enough to sharpen it a bit.




The top line of text. Arial Bold, 47 Pt; color is #BE0000. Not perfect, but pretty close.



The '+100 pts' text. Again the font is Arial Bold, 89 Pt with a color of #D5E200. The font is 100% correct, but it's close. As long as it's consistant throught it should look fine. Did I mention I love the corefonts?




The botton 'Seniors' text. Arial Bold, 94Pt, #44A61B. Again, the font isn't a perfect match, but it's prety good.



With the Gimp 2.3 we have a text option 'Text along Path'. After creating a path, we type our text and click the button. This makes a path of our wavy text. Stroke the path with 1 pixel #BE0000, then fill a selection from the path.



Last up is the blue lines. After selecting the rectange I made a bilinear gradient from colors #3848BA and #6973BA. This giveus us our final image!





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