Moodboards

MUSIC FESTIVAL: 'Where The Wild Things Are'

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

My music festival is called 'Where The Wild Things Are' after the famous book of the same name. It will be located near a forest which will have tents and stages named and created after elements of the book!

RESEARCH

Music Festival Poster

EXPRESSIVE WORDS

The task was to select five words and explore their expressive quality by manipulating the letterforms. 

TYPE PATTERNS

EVALUATION

The assignment was to make a horror film poster that was inspired by the distinctive minimalist style of graphic designer Saul Bass.

I began the assignment by researching horror film posters and pointing out the common styles, colours and design types that were used. I came to the conclusion that most horror film posters will use the colours black and red, I justified this as being because the colour black symbolises death, the unknown and fear. The colour red symbolises blood, danger, violence and evil. All of which are common elements of horror film. From this research, I then was able to use typical elements of horror film posters while still being original and creating a unique poster.

The process of making the poster in my case didn’t turn out to be so straight forward. I had made a poster for the film ‘The Night Listener’ and was very proud of it; however, some features of the poster didn’t abide by the guidelines of the task. This meant I had to start again and come up with new creative ideas! I then came across an Alfred Hitchcock horror film called ‘The Birds’ and once I saw excerpts of the film, I began to imagine a Saul Bass style poster for the film in my head. So straight away I sketched the idea down, and began work on it the next day. I’m much happier now with my final poster than I was with the original.

To create my final poster I used Adobe Illustrator. I arranged a group of black bird silhouettes together to form the main image for the poster using the pen tool. I did this because the whole film is based on a swarm of birds, so I felt this to be an effective way to represent the film using vectors. Once I had created the image, I went on to form the title and placing the other text on the poster. I used a bold typeface called Zentropa. I chose to use the bold font because the image was very attention grabbing, so I needed a font that would stand out among all the birds.

Many changes were made throughout the process of creating my final poster. For example, the first draft of the poster that I had made, I found to have too much text included, bearing in mind Saul Bass’ style was minimalist. So some of the text that was originally included on the poster was deleted to create a more simplistically Saul Bass style.

The colours I used for my final poster were Black, White and Red. I used these colours because the birds from the film were all black, so I illustrated them to be black on the poster as they were in the film. The colour red was used as there are some scenes involving blood (like most horror films).

Overall I am very happy with my final outcome and think the changes I made to it have been effective in making the poster simple and follow the Saul Bass style theme.

MY POSTER

This is my version of 'The Birds' poster. It has been made in the style of Saul Bass with a simplistic and bold layout.

THE BIRDS (1963)

The Birds is a 1963 suspense/horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock

HORROR FILM POSTER ANALYSIS

30 DAYS OF NIGHT POSTER

This poster uses many typical Horror poster themes. It uses only two colours, which are red and black. Red and black are the most common colours used on Horror film posters and this is because of what they represent and make you initially think of when you see the colours displayed in a certain way. The colour of red is used because in horror films, there are a lot of gory scenes that commonly involve blood, something that many people are slightly put off or disturbed by. The red is used to make you think of this, and also to give you insight of what will be shown in the film. Red also is a colour to signify danger, something that every horror film plot entails. Black symbolizes a long list of things in general and especially in horror. As black is the darkest colour there is, it connotes with darkness and the unknown, which can be considered scary and unsettling. Black also symoblises death, mystery, fear, evil, unhappiness, depth, hopelessness, sadness, remorse, anger, and mourning (to name a few). All of these things are very much referred to in horror films in some way or form. There will almost always be a scene where it is very dark in a horror film. The choice of colour used on a film poster is extremely important because a film poster is almost like a window/sneak peak insight

MOODBOARDS

Location

In horror film one of the main aspects that make the films scary is the location of where the film is set. To make the location scary, unusual or unknown locations are commonly used. For example the woods, an old haunted house in the middle of nowhere and abandoned buildings. This is to invoke our fear of the unknown and to create an unsettling sense of no hope or help being in such places.

Blood, Death, Gore

There are always scenes including blood, death or gore in every horror film. The whole point of horror film is the element of danger, which commonly results in some characters being killed, and others harmed (mentally, physically). This is a big reason as to why the colour red is used to commonly on horror film posters as it represents danger and blood.

The Threat

In every horror film there must be a threat of some sort. Some films such as The Ring, Hatchet and Chainsaw Massacre use monstrous threats that are of course not threats we’d face in real life, but because they have been created, there is more opportunity to create more scariness in them. Other films like The Night Listener and Silence of The Lambs use a psychological threat, which are people who are so unstable mentally to the point that they become life threatening to others. Events in these films on the other hand are much more likely to happen than monsters coming out of your closet!  The other common threat used in horror film is the paranormal. This is becoming an increasingly more common threat used in horror. I personally think this is because more and more people are becoming open to possibility of paranormal life being a reality.