I finally managed to complete the poster redesigns and have finished my presentation for those posters. The objective was simple; Create four poster redesigns, each of a popular movie. I had to change the style of the graphics in order to change the theme of that poster.
The first one I have posted is a Russian Constructivist version of Rocky IV. The use of a simple color scheme was essential to capturing the Constructivist style that is so prevalent in Soviet political propaganda. The radiant bands of color that expand like sun rays is something I saw in many examples that I had studied. The block like lettering was another crucial aspect of the poster that mimics Conscructivism. The colors I used were red, yellow and white. The two subjects of the posters, Rocky and Drago, both have white duplicates of their forms positioned behind their figures as to make them look like poster cut outs. I extracted them from a screen capture of the movie, but they were cut off at the waist, so I added a cut out of a globe to put under them. I feel that adding the boxing glove gave a nice focal point to the piece as a whole. It draws the eye in and then the eye can be guided to the rest of the poster from the bands of color that extend outward from that focal point.
The second poster redesign is a minimalist rendition of Clockwork Orange. This required me to be very simple with the design. I gave the bare minimum of detail that is required for you to identify the object in the center as an orange. I differentiated the stem and leaf by making the stem a slightly darker shade of green and made the orange a slightly darker shade of orange then the background. I wanted to differentiate the title in a subtle way that made it a little more interesting without going outside the bounds of what you could consider minimalist. I made the orange in "Clockwork Orange" a shade of orange while keeping clockwork white. I figured that graphically, it would put more emphasis on the subject matter, the orange in the center. The clock hands are black, which contrasts strongly against the orange. First the eye is drawn into the orange and then the orange of the title. My intent was to do these things so that when the eye is drawn to those things it will then take the poster in as a whole.
The third poster redesign was of the Stephen King's "IT". I wanted to turn the theme of the poster completely on it's head by turning the creature It, portrayed as Pennywise the clown, into a sympathetic character. This would be accomplished by making his face less menacing by drawing him with a smile and with both eyebrows furrowed. Furrowed eyebrows are typically seen when someone is sad or full of anxiety. This smile with the furrowed brow conflicts with one another. The only inference one could seem to make is that he is masking his anxiety by smiling, whoever contrived that may seem to the people to who is handing out balloons. One could even say that this makes him look awkward and bumbling, thereby turned this horror movie into a light comedy. I drew the poster by hand and then scanned it into adobe photoshop. I colored it with a series of overlay effects and then put a mask on it while proceeding to put another color on top of the sky in order to give more uniformity to the background.
The last poster redesign is of Clockwork Orange, but the design scheme is different this time around. I wanted to do a sort of homage to the kind of independent and indie films that people see on occasion in the theaters. The text looks very handwritten, just like what you see in posters of movies like Juno and Napoleon Dynamite. I also added stripes to the background to give it a design you'd expect a high school student to use when coloring the doodles he makes with marker. I felt this rendering made it seem more obviously Indie in those respects. The central figure in this poster is an orange I carved out with a pumpkin knife. I glued clock hands unto the orange to play along with the title, Clockwork Orange, but in a way that is much more playful then the minimalist rendition. I used sharpie to give it eyes and the carving gives the orange a nice toothy smile. This serves to make a sort of playful character, rather then the psychopath Alex that you see in the original film poster. I gave the orange the same markings that Alex has in the poster to hint that this is the central character even more by comparison to those that are familiar with it.
I felt that my Constructivist work was the most successful graphically. The presentation went mostly as well as I had planned it and the critiques seemed to confirm that the Rocky IV redesign was the most successful of my works. The next upcoming project will be of a story that I must create. The story must be a minimum of eight pages, all pictures, but the pictures must be constructed of text only. The text will be derived from excerpts from reading that he will send us. I must then bind the story as a book. I will be brainstorming for the next week about the particulars, though it seems like an interesting project. Updates will be posted when progress is made.
