fILM doo fILM POSTER DESIGN COMPETITION RESPONSIVE Ouil503: Orlaith Conlon
When I read the brief I knew I wanted to make a poster for the film ‘Full Metal Jacket’, because not only it’s one of my favorite films but I had sketched out and mocked up an idea for a poster based on this film years ago so now was a perfect chance to make it! I sketched out the portrait of Private Joker in pencil and a light wash of watercolour. I wanted to show his vulnerability but in a way that feels distant, much like the film, which is why I shaded in his glasses so the audience doesn’t see the emotion in his eyes. The background was an afterthought as I didn’t want to include a location scene, after playing and designinging patterns for the ‘Tigerprint’ brief I felt more confident and inspired to use repeat patterns in my work.
*Removed handwritten text on hat. *Outline applied. *Light shading with custom watercolour brush.
*Used the lasso tool to create camouflage shapes on the hat and used custom watercolour & pastel brush to fill. *Deeper shading applied.
*Carved out the eye area with deeper tones and scratchy texture. *Applied light tone of shadow along light side of face and right side of neck.
With this brief I really felt my abilities with Photoshop coming together, which made me feel really proud and excited that I will be able to produce professional quality work. This example on the left is an example of a moment when I knew what to do in order to get the result I wanted without having to go and watch a tutorial. Unhappy with the pencil version as it wasn’t prominent enough I found an image of the badge online and pasted it into a new layer, I then selected the white area and inversed it to fill with my custom brush texture, I then went over this with more texture in a different colour. I used the same technique for the helmet, yay learning!
When it came to type I thought briefly about using the same/similar font to the original poster because it’s so iconic, but then this wouldn’t be a very successful re-design to poach elements which are very recognisable to the original design. I stuck to a sans serif font to keep it modern and clean and decided on typeface ‘Code’ in bold, it’s simple and functional with rounded elements, I felt it fit the aesthetic of the film. One element I did poach from the original is the stacked use of type, they way you read it echoes an integral part of the film in which this phrase is spoken, it justt works.
Project Review I had so much fun on this brief, firstly I felt my confidence growing especially during the editing and Photoshop work, I felt I broke down a wall of combing analogue and digital in my work and for once I feel positive about the final outcome. Secondly, I used my bamboo wacom tablet more then ever before and combined with the discovery of some amazing custom Photoshop brushes I know I will be utilising this much more in my future practice. Throughout this brief I kept in mind the vulnerable quality of this character which also spans across the film as a whole. I believe I achieved this as I kept it a priority throughout, I didn’t want this to look like an action film poster. I worried only using one characters portrait would look too bare but I feel like there is an emotional connection to his look of confusing/pain/vulnerability and also of isolation which again echoes the film. The actual competition is great as it forced me to open a behance account (and use it!) and because it has a great twitter presence which shows you who else is taking part. The only frustrating element of this brief was the specified gigantic size of 686 x 1020mm. This would have been fine if I was submitting directly to Film Doo, but submitting through behance gave you a maximum file size upload of 8MB, my final image was 37MB in size at maximum resolution, which sadly meant I had to reduce the quality of the image to submit, which sucks!