Jason Knits

Yay! Spring 2009 session is over. I get to relax for one week before Summer session starts. But it is also kinda sad that it is over. Will I see those faces that I came to know over the past months again?

Here’s the last project that I turned in for the class. A movie poster:

We were to pick from a few movie choices for our posters. James Bond, Sweeney Todd, Blade Runner and Western. The style should follow Saul Bass’ or the International Typographic Style. I am not sure if mine can be considered Saul Bass influenced, but it definitely started there.

Originally I wanted to do simple block shapes (very Saul Bass) to respresent the living spaces of the Sweeney Todd characters. Three floors. Sweeney Todd on the top floor, Mrs. Lovett on the ground floor with the store front and a hot oven in the basement. But simple blocks just seemed too modern, losing that dark, grungy feel of the Sweeney Todd movie. While researching the look of the old Fleet Street I came across some nice illustrations that gave me the idea of just using obvious building shapes to the design. Still keeping them simple. It was actually quite freeing to not to care for details, nice change for a Virgo like me. I also went against recreating a complete street scene, keeping it focused on just a few so that the silhouettes could be as large as possible. I also eliminated the basement element for the same reason. I do have to say though, it looks a bit Psychoish. Someone in the class agreed.

The original colors were not shades of gray and red. I totally forgot to pay attention to the mood of the movie. I started with a golden glow in the windows and started using shades of the gold to color the rest of the buildings. The result was a brownish poster that my professor just did not like. She reminded me of the atmosphere of the movie. DOH! How did I forget that important element?

Our professor had a few retstrictions for almost all of the projects that we did. No gradient, no photography (except for Disney Concert Hall poster), only 3 to 4 colors, no wild font styles. It was really difficult at first, but I finally realized that these rules made me see compositions more clearly, without lots of graphic tricks to cloud things up, keeping the elements simple and well defined. It is more challenging to have less tools to work with, but the designs can turn out direct and powerful.

Note: The font that I used in the poster is called Wood Stamp, found on dafont.com. It worked out really well for my poster. But what really amazed me was how the letters behaved differently when placed next to certain other letters. Look at how E and R work together. Then there are L and E and E and T. I really want to know how this is done, how they code the font set to behave this way. Interesting.

Added 6.15.2009 7:55am, here’s the original color scheme for the poster. Not terrible, but doesn’t represent the atmosphere and style of the movie.