In Communication and conceptual design , the new project is to make a movie poster, based off of one of the pre-selected movies my professor gave us. They were all movies I have heard of but never watched: Night at the Opera, Pyscho, and others. I chose to do Citizen Kane. I really had no idea what the movie was, but I was pleasantly surprised that it was a black and white film. I then watched the movie, a prerequisite. It was a little sad, but the cinematography was really interesting to watch.
I started the poster in by actually looking at the old movie ads and posters. They were very of their time, posturized, and colorful. Which was great to advertise at the time because it was a black and white, so giving it a little life in the posters makes sense. I didn’t want to do that though, now looking back at such on old film, it would be misleading to make the posters colorful. I wanted the aesthetic of watching an old film to be known to the audience in the poster. I also didn’t want to make any graphics myself, that I didn’t want to put my style on the movie, but have the movie portray itself. So, I relied on stills of the movie, and typography, and started in Photoshop.
One of the big shots in the movie is when there is a huge banner that has KANE written on it with this huge blown up face under it. I liked the boldness of that typeface. Because of that I went with a san-serif bold face. Blocking out the title to fit horizontally. Then contrasting that thick text with the author’s name in a slim serif typeface.
Like I said before I wanted to rely on the photos of the movie for the ad. I started collaging all the photos on top of the thick bold font. Then I played with the blending mode until it only showed up on the black of the title. To keep it all clean I made all the pictures a clipping mask of the movie title. Then added a shadow effect to make the title look like a cutout on top of a collage.
At that point it was very bottom heavy, with nothing on top. I then added smoke as a symbol of the end of the movie, when Kane’s things were being burned. And I played with that until it was black and white but not too distracting.
