Influences part 17: poster design

Last week I received a box full of over 500 identical postcards from the printers so that I can promote my graduation film, and as I'm not doing anything else right now (1:30am), this seems like as good a time as any to document some of the film posters that influenced the design decisions behind the aesthetics of my film poster/postcards...
In case you haven't already seen it, below is the poster design for my graduation film: Pigment of Imagination

I had always planned on making my film poster from a drawing or painting that illustrates 'something' about my film, rather than just creating a layout around an existing piece of my film footage... I suppose the original influence for this design decision may have come from Erica's hand-drawn poster for The Gardener, which both I and many others greatly admired.

I have always enjoyed painting, so I wanted to incorporate that into the aesthetics of my poster; and this also linked nicely with my favourite style of film poster - the vintage film posters of the 1940s & 50s, that were painted by hand. Some of my favourite posters in this style include those for The 400 Blows, Vivre Sa Vie, Jules et Jim, and Casablanca:

The third major influence on the design of my poster was the layout of the posters for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho; but The Trouble With Harry and many other designs from the 50s/60s also greatly influence me.


Other notable influences include the artwork of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec...

And various Eastern European/Russian prints.

hmm... deadlines, posters, and confusion

One of my sources in the eca Jewellery department is quoted as saying "Degree show crunch time has hit ECA hard" (Fools Gold, 2009), but I have not realised any change... The animation department is near empty, and I still feel little stress).
There is only 15 days until the assessment deadline, and like my source at Fools Gold I got nothing done yesterday in terms of studio work. Instead I spent all day doing things that I don't remember, but which seemed important at the time, and then I stayed up all nite (from midnight-7am) trying to create the first version of my film poster for the eca Design school degree show catalogue (which nobody has been given definite instructions for)... Last nite I was aware that our image for the catalogue had to be 30cms tall at 300dpi and in portrait format, which therefore renders all my animation stills useless as they are only 12cms long at 150dpi and in landscape format). I therefore made what seemed like a sensible decision, and decided to create my film poster now so that it can be used for this catalogue as well as for the degree show exhibition.
I created my poster in a painted/design style inspired by classic film posters such as Jules et Jim, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Casablanca, Contempt, La Fiancee du Diable, La Strada, Nosferatu The Vampyre, Questa e La Mia Vita, The Trouble With Harry, and especially Psycho)... Below is my poster design as it currently looks, but I'm going to improve the fonts, repair the badly Photoshopped painting, and hopefully add more useful names to the list on the right hand side at a later stage...

After spending the best part of 9 valuable hours over two days on this poster for the Design school degree show catalogue, I received an e-mail from staff stating that there is a possibility that we, as filmmakers, may be getting permission to use our native landscape format instead of being forced into a portrait format - but we will find out for definite tomorrow (which seems a bit daft, after all that is just a day before our original catalogue image hand-in deadline)! If the powers that be decide to change their minds about the format of our pictures, it means that the time I spent making my poster was a waste of important rotoscoping and sleeping time (cos my workload obviously isn't yet stressful enough for me to go completely without sleep until the deadline)...

A mine of design

While drawing a new PoV shot for my film over the last two days I've spent even more time on the Internet looking for design influences... I just couldn't help myself - i love 'research'!
Over the last two days I've found so many wierd and wonderful things!!! Here's a round-up...

WebUrbanist is a great resource with loads of databases of very unusual things... One such database is 20 Unusually Brilliant Bookcase & Bookshelf Designs.

WebUrbanist also had these evocative databases collectively known as The (WU)ltimate 33-Part Guide To Abandonded Cities. I found it really useful for ideas to develop the spooky run-down aesthetic designs of the house in my film.

Another similar link is at Askville where people replied to a question asking 'What defines a house as spooky or haunted?' Although most of the answers are fairly common, it also has a few really unusual answers, and lots of good imagery and related links.

I found this blog post about Weird Chairs called That's What You Call Pain In The Ass. There are chairs made from cutlery, sharpened pencils, screws, and even featuring 3 sheep heads! But this set above, designed to look like a child's drawing, is my favourite.

Opera78 is a design board established in 2005 by Fiodor SUMKIN, and has lots of cool illustrations.

Tim Sale is the graphic novel illustrator who creates the artwork for Heroes. I just checked back on his website yesterday for the first time in ages, and forgot how great his work looks.

Earlier this evening I saw the advert for Ladyhawke's debut album on the TV, and it looks so awesome! It has wonderful watercolour illustrations and the coolest rotoscoping I've ever seen!
I checked out the music video for My Delirium on YouTube... It mixes live-action with the really cool rotoscoping and even has long sequences of animation created by digitally manipulating a series of watercolour paintings.
The illustrations and paintings were made by Sarah Larnach. And her watercolour paintings were turned into the awesome animation sequences by Frater at Partizan Lab.