International
Style
Movie
Posters
When the project was announced, I knew I wanted to do international style. The style
was intriguing and I was really curious about the nuances that make the style complex while looking stylistically simple. Throughout the project, I have produced ten movie posters in the international style, learning about various artists, techniques, and properties present with the style. These were created in a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Baby Driver
When I began this project, I knew Baby Driver, directed by Edgar Wright, was going to be the first one I made. For the most part, the inspiration for the entire project itself stemmed from the fact that I couldn't seem to find decent movie posters for some of my favorite movies, Baby Driver included. Many of the posters today follow the “tower of heads” style, which I just got tired of. For the poster I created, I was inspired by three main things. The color palette mimics the iconic color palette of the original movie poster. The text, which reads “BABY” in all caps, mimics the character Debora who sings “B, A, B, Y, Baby” in a very rhythmic way. The shape and sunglasses are inspired by the iconic scene from the beginning of the movie, where Baby watches the crew he is driving as they rob a bank.
The poster has not changed much since the first version I created on the left and the final on
the right. Since this was the beginning of the project, I didn't create it inspired by any one artist,
I was simply mimicking the style. As the project went on, and I became more aware of the style nuance, I aligned everything to a grid and got a little smarter about font weight for hierarchy.
Since this was so early in the project, I can’t say that it was directly inspired by any one artist. However, it might be stated that the project, subconsciously, was influenced by Jacqueline S. Casey’s use of negative space letterforms.
The Prince of Egypt
The Prince of Egypt is another movie that I love and I felt inspired to make a poster for it. I felt that it was important to play with the form of Moses, the main character, face. The movie focuses a lot on his identity and the old posters draw a lot of symbolism from the face of the sphinx, showing a side profile. I wanted to play with transparency to play on the “lack of solidness” within the character. This experimentation with transparency is inspired by Hans Neuberg’s use of transparency. I created the general shape of the face with basic shapes at a lowered opacity so that they would sort of phase in and out of each other. At some point, I added an Egyptian eye of Horus to solidify the concept that it is a face and not just a strange shape. The main obstacle for this poster was the text. I had an idea early on to have the text at an angle going down the face’s nose but after I did some more research on the style, I realized some of the downfalls of that approach. Mainly the lack of alignment and the disregard of the grid. I think the final version plays better with the grid. The first draft is shown on the left and the final on the right.
Bullet Train
Bullet Train quickly rose to the top of my favorite movie list. I think this movie’s main poster is chunky looking and the font choice is not good. I like some of the work of Rudolph DeHarak
and felt inspired by the sort of text at the top or bottom with a large icon graphic. The poster I designed is red with black spots, to represent the black and color scheme of a ladybug, the main character's code name. The ladybug has more significance to the movie itself so I thought an iconic closeup would be interesting. The other symbol is a specific Thomas the Train sticker which has significance to the film, reduced to its simplest shapes.
Up
For the Up poster, I wanted to mess around with some of Brockmann’s style. I love the Der Film poster and thought with such a short title, Up might be a good use of the overlapping text and
a large black-and-white image. This poster went through a lot of changes conceptually. Originally, I wanted to play around more with the colors of the cast but I realized they just weren’t as vibrant as I hoped. Ultimately, I like where this one ended up. As always, the first draft is on the left and the final is on the right.
The Revenge of the Sith
In this poster, I wanted to feature blue lightsabers clashing, as they are an important and abstract aspect of the movie. I originally had the sabers horizontally on third lines, but they didn't feel right and felt more like they were harmonious instead of against each other like I wanted. Ultimately, I made them clash, but to keep the poster visually interesting, I placed them in such a way that they correspond with a golden spiral, inspired by Hans Neuberg’s use of the golden spiral.
The Suicide Squad
For this poster, I had the idea in my mind pretty early. I wanted to represent Polka Dot Man, a main character in the movie in an abstract, Brockmann-inspired way. To accomplish this I used scale as well as black and white imagery in combination with basic colorful shapes. Initially, the hand was much smaller and pushed to the right but after some research looking into the style, I found that many in this format use a much larger image to increase the visual tension and make it all feel more intense. I only have the final version of this one, as it has not undergone many changes since its original creation.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
For this poster, I was heavily inspired by Jaqueline S. Casey’s style with an image at the bottom and text at the top. This poster was made right at the height of our class time learning about
the international style and I was drawn to the graphical style of Casey. I did, however, want to play on the style but make the image of the fox blurry, to mimic the character and the movie's fast-paced nature. The original is on the left, and the newest one, after some feedback, is on
the right.
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
I struggled to come up with unique ideas for this one. I didn’t want to do something obvious
(like a closeup of the logo) and I didn’t even want to keep to the black and red color scheme of the character. However, when I stumbled upon a video online about making halftones in Photoshop, I instantly connected it to the Spiderverse style. I created some orange hexagons
to mimic the multiverse portals of the movie and put some text over them. However, as you can see in the first version below, it's very hard to read. To overcome this, it was recommended that I mess around a little bit with some crop shadow-style effects, which I think ultimately give it a more comic-book feeling and fit the style well.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Inspired by Arnold Saks's Inflatable Sculpture poster, I wanted to go back to basics and play around with simple shapes. The movie features imagery of bagels and googley eyes. I wanted to evoke a bagel sending out signals and sort of being disrupted by the presence of the eye. That is the most wild explanation for the movie but It kind of makes sense if you’ve seen it.
Whiplash
This was the final poster I created. I had originally jumped around what movie would be the
final one, but one night the idea for this one popped into my head. The image is an image from Unsplash, which has been heavily edited to be the iconic shape in the final poster. I played around with text a lot, considering using quotes, but ultimately settled on the description of the movie. I feel that the drumstick leaves this tension over the text, like a drummer who has risen to hit the drum but hasn’t yet. Text was the big factor in this one, as change you can see below.
Conclusion
This project has provided me a chance to get closer to the style and the tools used to design in the modern day. I have used Illustrator plenty before the class, but there are so many tips and tricks I learned throughout this project. I learned how to do grids and guides properly to align things as well as plenty of tricks in Photoshop and how to properly link the two together. My opinion on the style has gone on a bit of a roller coaster. When I began the project, I was really into the style and was excited to create in the style. In the middle of the project, I started to dislike it. Making the posters felt repetitive and bland to me. However, at the end of the project, I enjoy the style again. I think this revival of enjoyment came from learning about the style more in-depth and learning about how artists push it while staying true to the look. I have learned
that the important part isn’t the grid or the font, but finding the best way to convey the
message concisely and simply.