Seeing Jim Groom’s minimalist movie poster for the The Thing finally get some love from Web Urbanist inspired me to finally take a stab at this assignment. I actually don’t need a lot of prodding to make a piece of design (especially for ds106).

My poster is for the John Boorman classic “Deliverance” starring Jon Voight. The song Dueling Banjos was made famous by the film, though apparently the original composer went uncredited (didn’t know that until now). The scene in which Drew plays the guitar and a boy plays the banjo is probably one of the most memorable scenes, and sets the tension in the film between the “city boys” and the “locals.”

I made the poster mashing a couple of previous ds106 assignments actually. I’d done a four icon challenge of Deliverance from which I reused the arrow, banjo, and title. And the background was reused from the “averaging flickr assignment.”

A little extra work was done to create the hole in the banjo from the arrow using the vector tool in Illustrator. And I did some hue/saturation work on the background in Photoshop to rework the yellow averaging flicker image into a muted green.

FMJ_Minimalist, a photo by theunwiseman on Flickr.

For my last design assignment, I chose to make another Kubrick movie poster in a minimalist style. I know it’s not very well done, but it was a rush job. I did my best not to make it look like a crayon, but hey, I’m no art major. Also, I’m not sure how that black border ended up around the left and top side of the image.

For my minimalist movie poster I choose the 1967 Godard film, Week-end. It’s one of my favorite films and one of the first that came to my mind when I thought of iconic/rememberable scenes.

Near the beginning of the film there is a lengthy single take of the protagonists (sort of) driving through a traffic jam in the countryside. The scene is extremely long, almost tortuous. Here is the link to the scene.

At first I tried to present this scene vertically, like a traditional movie poster would. I choose  to have the credit texts (correct term?) in a jumbled, disordered, and repetitious manner, echoing the way the cars in the scene are arranged. I did not like this initial attempt though. Not only was it not that minimalistic, but I didn’t think the vertical represented scene. I was also not too happy with the color.

So I redid it in a horizontal. In this new version I changed the color scheme and also tried to keep it more simple. I think it was worthwhile to try a new approach; the second one is superior, I believe.

Here is the original, vertical version (the text is intentionally cutoff, btw).

And here is the second, horizontal version.

Design assignment 43 brief

Create a TV/movie poster that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography.

The City of Lost Children

I chose the film The City of Lost Children as the subject for this minimalist design assignment. Some of my favourite features of the film are the relationship between One and Miette, the lush emerald-green colouring and the Cyclops.

Guess the movie…

Incidentally the poster was made with Adobe Illustrator. The bullets were made with the 3D revolve tool.