OUGD406: SB3- Alternative Movie Posters

'Fooling' Around

For this brief we had to produce an A4 two colour screen printed alternative movie poster based on a film chosen at random.

When it came too sketching ideas I had really wanted to watch the film first, however amazon failed to deliver on its promise and the goods in time. This meant that I was relying heavily on plot synopsis's, trailers, reviews and screenshots of the film in order to come up with my initial ideas. I read several reviews including ones from the New York Times, Rotten Tomatoes and one written by an independent blog site named Roger Eburt. All reviewers gave the film a positive and good review, stating specifically that this was Paul Newman's shining success as an actor.

Trailer: Nobody's Fool

The consistent theme throughout all these reviews was redemptions: A man (Sully, played by Paul Newman) wasn't a good or relevant father to his own son; he drinks and lives in his eighth grade teachers basement. He only manages to redeem his childish character when he meets his grandson and finally finds a reason to grow up. His redemption as a father figure and a human being and transformation into an adult is the main and constant story. So taking as many key themes I could identify I decided to map out some ideas and words to get some inspiration.

I'm not going to lie I was a little bummed out at my movie, it didn't seem like a film with any iconic visual ideas unlike Star Wars or the 5th Element and so as far as idea generation was going, I found it difficult to generate any strong visuals. It's also a very unknown movie, after asking many people about the film the response from all of them was the same and unhelpful 'No idea' (I mean even my dad hadn't heard of it and if my dad hasn't heard of it then it begins to really make me worry). I feel that this caused me to disengage slightly from this project and unfortunately this shows in my later work. 

So I decided to attempt to represent him before the redemption, the initial poster for the film depicts Sully looking sideways and speaks very little about the plot and his character. And I used this to inspire a design as well as a few screen shots I had gathered during my research; Sully talking to his son, Sully leaning at the bar, Sully sitting in his arm chair with a beer.

All in all very literal representations of the film, but I did attempt to find imagery that I felt in some way conveyed the themes of childishness, alcohol, redemption or father and son. 

I took these sketches into the crit and received some useful feedback, a lot of comments said that they liked the idea of a man at the bar best and the representation of alcohol as this best summed up his character (at least at the beginning of the film)

I also had one minor hiccough in that I had done some designs in landscape where the brief asked for portrait- lesson learnt: READ THE BRIEF ROZ.

Sometimes I feel like I'm so absorbed in my own ideas that I forget the rules and regulations applied to my design; this is certainly something I need to work on in the future. 

So I went forward and attempted to digitally mock up these ideas, but then I hit a problem, they just didn't seem to work. I was heavily relying on photographs and screenshots and when attempting to prepare them for screen print, none of the photographs or screen shots were of a high enough quality or a large enough image to create a decent dots representation of it. 

So I revised my ideas, went back to my feedback and did a little more research. People had mentioned that the idea they liked best were the ones representing alcohol or beer,I felt this would be the strongest way to move forward. Upon my further research I also found the book cover for Nobody's Fool, originally written by Richard Russo and published two years before the film was made. 

I also managed to find a version of the DVD case with a different tagline to the original poster stating 'Older doesn't always mean wiser'. I was inspired by the imagery on the book front and this tag line and so decided to produce a design that reflected both.

I took the imagery of the beer and pretzels and created a vectorised image of it, I felt that this managed to convey the tone of the film without being a literal interpretation of a screen shot. However attempting to add the tag line into the beer image didn't really work out too well, it made the image appear crowded and the simplicity that came from a vector image was completely lost. However I was still inspired by the tag line and so attempted to find a font that looked similar to the one it was written in. 

Now it was time to find the strongest arrangement of text and image and so I produced three varying layouts so I could better visualise what the final design was going to look like. 

Arrangement 1

Arrangement 2

Arrangement 3

For the final design I chose the third arrangement. I felt it looked the strongest and most like a movie poster, it was also the one that received the most positive reaction when it came to getting feedback from my peers. (However on later reflection I wish I had chosen the first arrangement... looking back it looks much better and the text due to it's colour and shape looks like the bar that the beer and pretzels are resting on)



Producing the Positives and Screen Printing

The next stage after the design had been completed was to produce the positives in preparation for screen printing. Unfortunately when transferring the vectorised image of the beer and pretzels produced in illustrator over to photoshop some pixillation occurred meaning that the positives lacked the curved and neat edge that I had originally designed and instead had jagged and pointed curves. This really annoyed me and no matter what I tried to do the pixillation remained (however on reflection perhaps exporting the illustrator file as a PDF may have reduced this- lesson learnt.)

This pixillation transferred into the final prints as well, they too have jagged edges and look rather bitmap/paint. Which is a shame. The prints also turned out rather awfully and not one of them seemed to be 100% correct, I blame this on the rushed printing job I did when screen printing the designs. I had my job to go to that evening and instead of leaving the first colour to dry properly and returning to the print room the following day to finish them I attempted to get all four versions completed that night. This caused smudging, double printing, patchiness and off alignments- part of me felt that this actually tied into my concept of the unfinished and rough character of Sully... another part of me thought that was a horrible excuse and that I had really messed the posters up.

Another part of this brief was submitting our designs to alternative movie posters, as of yet I haven't heard anything back from them, but I sincerely doubt my design will make it up there with all the others.

 How did it go?

Not well, I really thought I'd enjoy this brief and unfortunately I didn't. I can blame this on my selected film (which about 40% of me is) as for so many other movies I had such wonderful ideas and visual images that just popped into my head, yet with my own movie I felt little to nothing for it. I really wish I had gotten a film I liked, when I care about something it shows in my work and I always managed to produce something successful 

The other 60% of blame is me. I want to be a designer and not every subject I will design for I will like, this is something I'm going to have to improve upon over the next two years if I ever expect to be a professional. I need to find a way to make myself care. 

I also resent rushing the printing process, the final posters when compared to my peer's designed looked so empty and awful in design and in production. I really didn't want to submit my design to alternative movie posters out of shame for it- I hate having to announce 'I designed that'. 

On the positive side this brief may have not been a success but it has been informative, I've learnt a lot about myself as a designer and a lot about my weaknesses, all issues I can address for the next brief.