For my third design assignment, I created a vintage movie poster using a modern film with actors from an earlier era. I took this concept a step forward and decided to fully blend two movies from two different eras. The modern film I picked was Get Out (2017) and the classic movie I paired it with was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). I chose these two films because they both deal with race, specifically interracial relationships, and they also feature a black male lead visiting the house of a white family. I also thought it would be a somewhat comical pairing, considering the fact that one of these films was a romantic comedy-drama meant to be a positive depiction of interracial relationships and the other is an allegorical horror film about the appropriation and fetishization of black culture (among other things).

I decided to commit fully to the look of the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner poster, so my basis was the original design from 1967. For this assignment, I worked in Photoshop. I used the spot healing brush tool to blend the original text of the poster into the background colors so that it would be as smooth as possible. I used the typeface Caslon because it closely mimicked the look of the serif type used on the original poster. Then it was simply a process of replacing the original text with text from the Get Out poster.

Probably the most entertaining part was creating the lowercase logo for the movie. Originally, as a result of the default spacing of the text, there was a lot of space between the words “get” and “out.” I had to adjust the type a lot before I settled on the staggered layering of the works. I think it works very well because of how the curvature of the lower half of the ‘g’ interacts with the ‘o’ and fits in with the overall vintage feel.

I loved that western showdown scene between the police and the FBI. This part had GIF written all over it. I had the idea to put the three of them together, so I was careful to make all of them the same number of frames, with the same timing. Then I thought it would be better to do a rolling animation, like what I ended up with. It took me a while to think about how to do it. I started to write up the process, but the write-up was as tedious as doing it in the first place. If you want the details, let me know.

Once I had the GIF, I had to figure out what to do with it. I went looking for a design assignment and found Movies from Another Time and Animated Movie Posters. My image didn’t really fit either of them. I clicked the Remix It button and this came up:

Jump Shrimp
Find a completed assignment and create it’s oxymoron, something that is contradictory to what was made.

I had been thinking of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly anyway, what with the western theme, and the contradictory aspect made everything fall into place. Prez is good at some things, but in general he strikes me as a bad cop in the Martin Short sense, i.e. less than competent. Lester, on the other hand is good police. Bunk was born in a three piece suit, (almost) always dressed to the nines, so he could be the opposite of ugly.

For the text, I put together characters from The Wire and characters Leone’s movie, and used some of the behind the scenes names from The Wire. I did all the text in Garamond because it’s on Vignelli’s approved typeface list – actually it’s a versatile classic font.

I should note that my entire process here is pretty much the opposite of good design. Instead of designing something to fit the assignment, I’m trying to bend an assignment to fit my image. But so what.