ANNIE ATKINS 1
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CONTENTS Graphic Props
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Penny Dreadful
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Titanic
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Tudors
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The Grand Budapest Hotel
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GRAPHIC PROPS Annie Atkins specialises in graphics for filmmaking. As well as creating contemporary artwork for movie posters, she also makes any graphic pieces outlined by a period film script – like the flags, banknotes, passports, and telegrams used to help create Wes Anderson’s fictional State of Zubrowka. She studied Visual Communication in London, then, after working as a graphic designer for advertising in Reykjavík, Iceland for 4 years, she attended University College Dublin to study for an MA in Film Production in 2007.
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STREET POSTERS | Graphic design for street posters in London’s East End
PENNY DREADFUL Penny Dreadful is a British-American horror TV series. The title refers to the penny dreadfuls, a type of 19th-century cheap British fiction publication with lurid and sensational subject matter. The series draws upon many public domain characters from 19th-century Irish and British fiction, including Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Mina Harker and Abraham Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Victor Frankenstein and his monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. HANGING SIGNS | Graphics for hanging signs in Victorian Mayfair
Atkins and her crew created most of the street and shop graphics seen in the series, these include The street posters in London’s East End and the lamp graphics for George King’s funeral Parlour. Along with the Shopfront signs for Groves teashop of Mayfair, Florence Sidaway’s Mayfair sweet shop, The Mayfair Gun Shop, and the hand lettered graphic for Ethan’s Wild West Stagecoach.
THEATRE BOX OFFICE | Posters and signage for the Grand Guignol’s Box Office 7
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THE TITANIC In 2012, Atkin’s designed advertising and paper props for Lions Gate Entertainment’s 12-part television costume drama series Titanic: Blood and Steel. It is about the construction of the RMS Titanic. The series premiered in Germany and Denmark on April 15, 2012, in Italy on April 22, 2012 and in France on December 2012. Part of filming took place in Serbia, where it aired beginning September 9, 2012. In Canada, it began to air September 19, 2012 on CBC. It was aired in the United States as a six-part miniseries with two episodes back-to-back from October 8, 2012 until October 13, 2012 on Encore. Titanic: Blood and Steel focuses on an aspect of this epic story that has never been explored, the story of the birth of the ship; the planning and the construction of the doomed luxury liner. It is also a passionate love story set against the backdrop of this turbulent age, facing love, loss, triumph and disaster. The series follows the lives of the people who made the Titanic: from the workers who built it to the rich financiers. Dr. Mark Muir, an engineer and metallurgist, convinces American tycoon J.P. Morgan to hire him for the biggest shipping project in the world, the construction of the RMS Titanic at Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard. Though the mini series is known for its many inacuracies with some of them so fundamental that if they were corrected, it would completely alter the series. Aside from this, there is a sense of realism in the graphics produced.
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THE TUDORS Atkin’s first job after graduating was on the third series of The Tudors, designing all kinds of royal scrolls, stained glass, and ancient maps. The series was produced by Peace Arch Entertainment for Showtime in association with Reveille Productions, Working Title Television, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and was filmed in Ireland. Although the series is named after the Tudor dynasty as a whole, is based specifically upon the reign of King Henry VIII of England, a competitive and lustful monarch who navigates the intrigues of the English court and the human heart with equal vigor and justifiable suspicion. Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Queen Katherine, Thomas Cromwell, Pope Paul III round out caracters of this lavish epic. Season three focuses on Henry’s marriages to Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, the birth of his son Prince Edward, his ruthless suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the downfall of Thomas Cromwell, and the beginnings of Henry’s relationship with the free-spirited Catherine Howard. Atkins exsplains her experiences on the set: “No job since then has ever been as exhilarating as that first season spent on a film set, surrounded by beautiful princesses in corsets drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups.”
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THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL Annie Atkins doesn’t like to live in the here and now, at least not in her professional life. As the lead graphic designer on Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, she was in her element. “I love period stuff. If not period, then something futuristic,” she says, following a Q&A with a small, enraptured but terribly hung-over crowd on the second morning of the Drop Everything festival in Ireland. “I love the Harry Potter movies. I love that mix of old and magical. I love Tim Burton movies… anything where you can bring a bit more imagination to it, like Wes’s films.”
TELEGRAM | Final revision.
Atkins and her team were responsible for all the graphics on The Grand… including all the signage and numerous small props such as handwritten letters and newspapers, to banknotes and prison wall graffiti. They were based upstairs in the same art nouveau department store – in Görlitz on the Germany/Poland border – used for many of the hotel interior shots. She was asked if there’s an inherent contradiction in film graphics, in that in order to succeed, they mustn’t stand out. “It depends on the film, “ she says with authority. “If you’re making something that’s very much about realism they shouldn’t catch the eye because it’s all about the actors and the story, these are just things that help create the world around them. If your eye’s drawn to a graphic, it’s probably because there’s a spelling mistake. With Wes’ films he uses the graphics themselves as storytelling devices; he uses them in close-up. It’s a very different way of working.” Given the passion and work Atkins puts into her craft, one suspects she prefers it that way.
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ZUBROWKA KLÜBECKS | Final currency design.
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Annie Atkins Twitter: @AnnieAtkins By: Dalice Travillion. 2015. Email: dalice.travillion@rmcad.edu
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