FMP Proposal Form:
Final Major Project Proposal Unit 6: Application, Exploration and Realisation in Art and Design
Learner Name: Jamie Furlong
City of Bristol College Date: 28/02/2020
College Green Centre, St Georges Road Bristol
BS1 5UA
Specialist Area: Photography
Section 1 Working Title: What you will work towards producing: I am going to be working towards producing 10 movie posters but with my own interpretation of familiar films . For example, I will be taking famous movie posters and using a scene of my choice from the movie as the poster. Two of the posters will be printed at a bigger scale and the other eight will be in a book with my reviews of the movies and how/who made the posters.
Section 2 Influences, starting points, and contextual references: Drew Struzan is an American cinematic artist who illustrated many movies including Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. His illustrations consisted of photos with bright, bold and eye catching colours of the main actors with a water colour edit on them in post to create a surreal, fantasy look to it.
Early Ideas and Research: One of my ideas is to create a famous scene (scene below) from Reservoir Dogs but to show which characters are which, I will colour coordinate their ties. For example, Mr Orange will have an orange tie and Mr White vice versa. My other idea is to get a pumpkin and do the 1978 Halloween poster with the reflection of Michael Myers on the knife stabbed into the pumpkin. Most of the photoshoots will be heavily manipulated in Photoshop to give the effect and pay homage to the original poster so people are more easily able to tell what the poster is without just looking.
Section 3 Intended techniques, media processes: I intend to get some friends of mine to be in the movie posters. I will let them know a week in advance so I can get the props and costumes they may need for the shoot. I am going to be using “Blurb” to create the book for the eight photos I am going to be talking about and reviewing. This will be a simple and easy process and should be under £50.
Timescales: I am looking towards doing around 2/3 photoshoots a week and preferably the outdoor photos that don’t need to be done during college; in my own time. On the weekends before each shoot I will be going shopping for props and clothes for the depending shoot. The specific weeks I shall be shooting will be weeks 25 – 31
Section 4: Proposed method of Evaluation: My two final pieces are intended to be framed and mounted with the book of eight movie posters with them. This will be simple black frames from a local shop.
Research:
Bill Gold was an American graphic designer who made hundreds of movie posters over 70+ years. He has done cult classics such as Goodfellas, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry and The Exorcist.
Movie posters that have inspired me to do this have come from Martin Scorsese and the mafia themed genre of movies, this has been movies “Goodfellas”, “The Irishman” and Brian De Palma’s “Scarface”
These movies are/can be quite dark & gritty films so it is only fair that the posters represent that. Goodfellas has the three protagonists coming out from the shadows overhead of the gritty streets of New York with Robert De Niro as the centre piece of this poster and the illustrator has given him and only him a red tie to signify him being the leader in this scenario.
Scarface is very much a character transition story from good to bad. Al Pacino as Tony on the poster shows him standing there with a gun in his hand on the black side of the poster. I feel that the black and white on the poster is meant to represent the transition of Tony going from a man just trying to make a living to a huge ego’d man with a drug empire to big for his own good.
Drew Struzan is an American illustrator who made the Glossy Composite movie poster style popular that involves a bunch of people in the scene with low light colours and has been used in over hundreds of movie poster from Blade Runner, Indiana Jones and Star Wars.
His signature look was made noticed by his use of photos and layering it over with airbrushed acrylic paint to give the effect of the old 50s/60s movie posters, commonly used in westerns and old mafia movies. This glossy composition has maintained it’s popularity since the 80s and is now the most popular form of making movie posters although the classic airbrushed acrylic paint style is not as commonly seen apart from the odd poster that is paying homage to the original style.
Everything in these posters have things or represent what the movie is about and perfectly captures the atmosphere of these films. Indiana Jones has browns/reds & yellows to signify danger and adventure with subtle greens to represent where they are in the movie which is the more tropical parts of India. Blade Runner has reds/yellows to represent the dystopian future of neon signs and blues for the non stop rain which plays a big atmospheric part in the movie.
As you can see in the posters below, he would choose a select group of colours and put that into the poster:
Doing this gives the posters a unique, simple look to them without over complicating the colours. This also makes it easier for the viewers to look at compared to movie posters like these that are way to eye torturing although all of this comes down to personal preference:
These posters are bad in my opinion for some reasons and it isn’t anything to do with lack of colour because I think Scarface and Goodfellas are fantastic posters. All three of these are not in the slightest bit pleasing to look at and are certainly not eye grabbing. The use of depth of field in the “Alien Covenant” poster is really ugly to look at, there is nothing really going on in the background apart from some sky and rocks with the text above the alien matching the colour scheme of the photo. This colour palette consists of black and dark navy blues which doesn’t suit the movie at all.
If this poster didn’t have the title on it then I don’t believe that many people would know that it was to do with X-Men films. Although the photoshopping of James McAvoy’s head is well done, the placement of it is poor. The silhouette of Patrick Stewart clips into McAvoy’s head and it looks really off.
There is reflections/light at the bottom of the silhouette hitting the wheel chair but it is completely jet black on the top half.
Overall I think that a movie poster should represent what the movie is going to be like and this does not capture that at all. X-Men First Class is quite a bold colourful movie and this poster is simple, serious and bland.
Planning:
As I am doing iconic movie posters I will be rewatching the movies that I will be doing to get a sense of what I can put into the poster since most of these will original designs and not taken from the main movie poster itself with a few exceptions.
I intend to use the studio for the majority of these shoots as a lot of these posters are going to rely on the lighting and it is easier to manipulate that in the studio.
Contact Sheets:
A lot of these images are similar to each other as I was trying to execute a certain pose from the movie but the main bit that might make some photos not as good as others was trying to get the lighting to be perfect and positioning the model at the same time as these are almost all just silhouette photos.
There are some photos where the models arm may be sticking outside of the white area of the photo like seen in some of the images below. This makes it harder to edit them in post as I want the whole background to end up being white.
Some of these are actually good photos which I would like to use but it will just be a bit more difficult to edit.
Because we are wearing white shirts in this shoot, light from the background is shining through them meaning you can see the white of the shirt which at first I thought was going to be a problem but I am going to end up using as I think it gives of a really nice subtle effect. This also let’s the viewer know what they are wearing.
There isn’t much to say about the actual images themselves as these will be heavily edited to get that scarface poster look. My main goal when doing this shoot was just to alters the models position slightly until I got that perfect pose and also easiest to edit in post. The lighting didn’t matter too much with this one, as long as the light was on his face then it was okay.
Edited Images:
Final Outcomes:
Furlong Photography 