Saul Bass (1920 - 1996) had a very recognisable style of design in his many animated title sequences and simple, yet striking, posters. This evening I have designed a few of my own minimalist film posters with his style in mind depicting some of my favourite films as well as one future release.The first design was an obvious choice if you know anything about my history with cinema, Jurassic Park has influenced me and became a slight obsession in the wake of its release in 1993. The simple white teeth of a dinosaur framing the title, in the hand drawn lettering that made Bass so iconic, over a blood red backdrop.
My next reinterpretation was for Memento, a film that I find simply incredible in it's story-telling and the visual look that Christopher Nolan achieved.
In designing this I went for a monochromatic scheme in keeping with the black and white sequences of the film, I also played with the text a bit more - using the T to extend and subtly becoming the outline to a Polaroid picture (imperative to the main character's existence).
Sunshine is a fantastic science fiction film by Danny Boyle (director of recent Oscar-heavyweight Slumdog Millionaire) - featuring a limited cast, superbly designed spacecraft/suits and stunning views of our sun. The idea here is simply 'the sun is very big' and to be fair it is possibly the one design that bears some resemblance to its official counterpart.
Originally this was going to be for X-Men but since the character has his own film coming out soon I decided to go with Wolverine for my next effort. Starting with the hair, then the eyebrows I decided to add a question mark over his head - if I had stuck to doing this as an X-Men poster then this would have linked in with the plot revolving around him trying to find out about his lost past - as it is the film will actually reveal his origins, at least within Marvel's film continuity. I kept it in and went with a slightly more varied and what I thought of as a bit of an unusual choice of colour scheme, I guess it was perhaps a reference to the brightly coloured costumes often found in comics but not always in their film adaptations.The final three are variations on a theme of The Dark Knight, with deep dark blue/purple tones I tried to make the title almost vanish with the background like Batman hiding in the shadows. At first I wanted to keep to just showing the hero but in the end I couldn't resist drawing red scarred lips and that led to straggly green hair framing the poster. I particularly like how the red can be seen coming through the eyes of Batman's silhouette.
In the future maybe I'll mock up some animated title sequences for these films, in the mean time I will continue on with my Trunk internship and sketchbook work.
