The task for this studio brief is to create a movie poster about a given film starring Jack Nicholson. I have been given 1963's 'The Terror' as my film. Only 2 colours plus stock must be used to create the poster.
Firstly, I watched the film as research, which can be found here. After I watched the film, I realised that it was very much a 'B Movie' Gothic Horror, a common occurrence in 1960's cinema. Many low budget horror films were created during this time for teenage and young adult audiences spurring the regular movie theatre culture. This film in particular re-used the sets from various other films because of it's particularly low budget!
So I looked into B-Movie Horror posters, inspiring my style of lettering for the movie title. I also looked into movie poster artist Tom Whalen because of his frequent use with a limited colour palette and vector imagery.
Development and final product:
I started off with a quick sketch:
My sketch included the castle from the film as the backdrop and quirky 1960's style lettering as the main feature.
So I began to develop the lettering first and foremost.
Subtle differences such as moving the crossbar in the 'E' down and refining curves in my opinion made the word as a whole stronger.
Experimentations
After looking at the work of Steve Simpson, I was inspired by his heavily rendered vector lettering and thought that this technique would come into good use for this poster.
So I duplicated my lettering, added an outline in white but made sure the line was on the inside of the path.
This left a slightly smaller, trimmed version of the lettering.
I added a gradient to it but wasn't sure how I felt about the result and so continued with the rest of the poster for the time being, before finally deciding that flat colour was most probably suitable for this poster.
Experimentation with sea and castle details
In my drawing, the main feature is the castle looming over with steep perspective, and the rough ocean splashing up the bottom. I began to draw most of the ocean using the charcoal brushes in adobe illustrator.
Even with the text laid over, I felt that the imagery was starting to make the design look a bit dated rather than retro, even with flat text. I was also finding it hard only using 2 colours whilst trying to make the text stand out.
Final Resolution development
After looking at a few more movie posters, in particular a werewolf poster by Tom Whalen, it came to me that the text would stand out best on a white background. In true horror movie context, I chose the moon, meaning I could still use my ready-drawn castle!
In the previous design I felt like the castle and text were competing with each other because of size and colour and so I made the main feature of the poster the text and the castle an added feature.
I added the ocean like in the last poster design but showed the reflection of the moon on the water, too and made waves in a lot simpler style.
At first, I found the text difficult to work with, because I wanted to use more than one font as the one I had chosen only had one weight and was quite short and stumpy and so needed a contrasting style. At first I added a cheesy B-Movie tagline to the top but later decided that it competed too much with the rest of the design and was removed.
I wanted to include the bird from the film but was struggling on where to place it...
The final resolution saw the bird a lot smaller flying over the words. To add to the centrally aligned design, I also added Andre on a horse at the bottom of the design. Although I think red works best, I couldn't choose between these three colours!
The brief was only to be set for 1 week maximum, and I watched and completed the poster in 2 days.
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