Poster 2 Progress: The Thing Beyond Sight

08 Apr 2020

To see what this project is based on, see the first post in this series.

The Darkness descends
nocturnal beast come to feast
craving for lost souls.

Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-night-descends by Kay, November 2014

In this poster I was to make a movie poster, focused on the theme of The Fear of Things that You Don’t Know. Applying principles of color theory, textual elements, Organisational principles of typography, and semiotics.

I started by making another bunch of sketched ideas:

This one was an attempt to emulate a dutch angle type composition to make the viewer feel uneasy.

In this one I thought of an idea and a title before realizing it would be impractical for me to make given time constraints. Although it was meant to have color theory in mind with a blueish monochrome look.

Beast, a simple title for a simple poster. It was meant to signify claw marks on a locker and I think that went quite well even missing quite a few things that would actually be there.

I wanted to play with shadows, looking up stairs at a doorway, a low point of view making it more ominous.

In this one I mostly played with typography, playing with the spacing of the letters to see if it would seem, for a lack of a better term, weirder to have them all spaced out like that.

This one was inspired by the first episode of The Magnus Archives. And I felt that it hit the theme of things hiding in the dark very well. I tired to use the rule of thirds a little so you would look into the shadows at the end of the alley first.
This is the one I continued with.

Once all those where completed the world started to turn upside down, which caused no end of worry and confusion, but I managed. I made a first draft, completely forgetting about color theory, and continued making draft after draft of that one till finally realizing what I had done (Or rather, what I hadn't done) and rebuilding it, from the ground up, to use color theory, make better use of textual elements, and become much more focused.

My first draft, I used the rule of thirds to place things, the top of the angler, an internal rule of thirds to create the gap between the walls, and some simple shapes + warping to make the walls themselves. Unfortunately it was much too bright, and didn't look much like a movie poster.
If you look very closely you can see shapes in the darkness that where supposed to use the gestalt principle of closure to create the image of something hiding there.

Another Angler image

Here I started playing with taglines to make it seem more like a movie. I also darkened the walls in an attempt to make it look more like a creepy alley.

This was the last one that I used this poster for, changing the font to "Chiller" a font that seemed to be much more signifying of the horror genre. Although the small font was hard to read, and it still didn't look too much like a movie poster.

Thus I rebuilt it. Focusing more on the monochrome color-scheme (Shades of black and red). The red "Chiller" font being a great sign/signifier for blood/the horror genre, and drew your eyes to it, then up to the Angler itself. It still was missing that certain something that made it look like a movie poster rather than a album cover.
Here the shapes "hidden" in the darkness are more pronounced, but they still give the sense of something hiding just out of sight, as the light reveals some of it, but they fade into the lesser darkness.

After getting some feedback I realized what it was missing, that thing that is on almost every movie poster that makes it obvious, credits!
I also changed the font of the smaller text to make it easier to read, as the title text really sold the horror feel, and the smaller text was there to enhance the movie poster experience.

After that I gathered some feedback and experimented a bit with making the walls and floor a bit gradient to make it seem like they where coming towards you, although I found I liked the flat plane walls better than the gradient plane walls.

A final modification to the design was centering the credits to, again, make it look more like a movie poster.

This is also the point for me to talk about how the abstract visuals of the final poster could signify a alleyway (As was originally intended) or a door opening and the light from the Angler spilling in. Both feel very horror to me, and both are fine ways to take it.

References:
1. Current COVID-19 Alert Level. (2020, April 6). Unite against COVID-19. https://covid19.govt.nz/alert-system/current-alert-level/
2. Kay. (2014, November). The Night Descends, Haiku. Family Friend Poems. https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-night-descends
3. The Magnus Archives | Rusty Quill. (2016, March 24). http://rustyquill.com/the-magnus-archives/