Illustration & Visual Narrative // Project 2

19/05/20 - 08/06/20 / Week 6 - Week 8

Ibrahim Fazal Ahmad / 0337423

Illustration & Visual Narrative / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylors University / Project 2 

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A Decisive Movement - Create an animated movie poster

For our second project, we will working on making an animated movie poster. Firstly I'm going to have to choose a movie which is a little difficult considering I barely watch them. But I've been very interested in this one movie called "1922" a Netflix adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Since I didn't have any other movie in mind, I ended up sticking with it and watching the movie to understand it to see what elements from the movie I could use for the poster. 

RATIONALE:

Figure 1: 1922 official poster

The movie I have chosen is “1922” directed by Zak Hilditch but is based on the 2010 novel by Stephen King. It is a psychological horror/drama movie which revolves around how our actions will always catch up with us eventually and how guilt can plague you forever.

 Figure 1.01: Scene from 1922

I chose this movie because I honestly loved how they conveyed the guilt that Wilfred (the main character) was feeling through association. In the plot, both he and his son end up murdering his wife and throwing her body down a well, when he goes to check on it and he sees it is infested with rats. Ever since then rats have a direct correlation with the guilt he feels from the murder. After the ordeal, everything goes downhill and he loses more than he could imagine by the end. 

Here are a few of my inspirations and just poster designs that I really liked. I feel like they're all just very interesting to look at and show enough about the movies without revealing exactly what it is about.

Figure 1.02: (Left to right) Indiana Jones, Parasite, Inception.

My goal with this movie poster is to give a very dramatic and unnerving feel to it. When you look at it you get a clue as to what happened but wonder what could be events that lead to this. Watching the movie I was never scared as there were no jumpscares, however I felt a sense of dread and suspense throughout. For this reason the keywords I have chosen are dread, suspense and drama. I want to go for a high perspective poster, like a worms eye view looking upon the farmhouse. I also want very high contrast colours in the poster and have a strike of lightning really light up the whole image.

For the animation process, I will be using either Adobe Animate or Adobe Photoshop since I have experience in the both of them. I am however more comfortable using Animate for actually animating.

 Design 1: For this design, I wanted the main character to be the main subject in the poster in the direct centre. He is in the middle of his corn farm "alone". The animation would be, a bolt of lightning striking and this causes his son and wife to appear behind him. I think this design is too simple in a way, and very basic in terms of composition.

Design 2: For the second design, I wanted to make it look like a worms eye view. You are on the ground and looking up towards the well that his wife was thrown down. In the movie there's a scene which I couldn't capture, of just the well with the two shovels that the son and father used to fill up the well with dirt. I thought this would make for an interesting poster as it implicates something happened but leaves the viewer in the dark. The animation would be the clouds moving, plants waving and blood dripping from the shovel.

Design 3: For this design I also went for a worms eye view. In this it's supposed to look like you're inside the well and looking up towards the main character. He is holding the shovel, though he didn't actually use it to kill the wife I thought it would be interesting to add the blood on it. I thought this composition was the most interesting personally and I really liked how it turned out. The animation would be the clouds moving, plants waving and possibly the blood dripping from the shovel.

FEEDBACK:

After showing my designs to Ms Yvonne, she said that the third design looked the most interesting and looks good to start working on already. However she said I can make a few more changes being: make the farmers silhouette clearer, currently it's hard to tell exactly what's going on from the silhouette. Also to add blood dripping down the the side of the well to fill up the empty space on the bottom left. Other than that it was good.

After my designed being approved, I made the changes that were asked. I made the arm holding the shovel more clear to make silhouette clearer and I added the blood dripping down the side of the well. I also fixed the perspective from the original sketch as it wasn't correct. 

I used only 3 colours in this composition, the words I chose for this were "drama and suspense" and I feel like minimal colours mimic drama much better. Especially because chiaroscuro is used to incite drama, I made the main character just red and used darks and lights to highlight his figure. I also removed his eyes because it is typically done in simple illustrations when something suspenseful or dramatic happens. I also feel like it adds a layer of mystery as we connect heavily using eyes and without them it feels almost inhuman at times. Now I have to animate the poster, each layer that requires animation is on its own layer, including each and every corn plant in the background.

FEEDBACK: Ms Yvonne said that it looks good, but to add a title as it would fill up the amount of negative space on the bottom of the composition.

 REFLECTION:

Experience: This project was really interesting and fun to do and really made me experiment in terms of composition and colour. This was also my first time using Adobe After Effects. I am already a user of Adobe Animate for around 1 year prior to this course so I was hoping it would be a transferable skill set. Well, not really but Adobe After Effects wasn't very difficult for the simplistic motions I demonstrated, it would have been harder to achieve this (specifically the plants waving) in Adobe Animate.

 

Observation: One observation I made was that horror movie posters very often uses chiaroscuro and also the gestalt theory. It gives the viewer a sense of drama and also surprise which can make them interested enough to watch the movies. I also noticed this movie in particular had very little posters and they were all quite simple and did not give away much about the movie to pique your interest. Colour schemes are also vital when doing a piece, the colours I used were very dark and in your face with high contrast against each other for dramatic effect. If I were to use a very subtle and muted palette it would have created a different effect.

Findings: I found the enormous difference making multiple designs can make. I had originally thought my first design was already decent and good enough. But I remembered what Ms Yvonne had told me last project about pushing yourself to come up with more ideas and it really pushed me to think outside the box and see what I could do. I really appreciated being told that because without it I don't think I would have had this specific final piece.