Type + Image Design: Movie Poster
Taught by Franz Werner at Rhode Island School of Design -- Summer Institute of Graphic Design Studies. 2 week course. Project was 2 days.
We first watch the movie, The Conformist, then we were asked to make a movie poster. I googled images of the conformist to jog my memory and did further research to come up with these ideas.
The bottom right concept was stronger, so I decided to push that idea further. The concept came from a scene in the movie where the main character, Marcello, is in an office and holds up the salute of a Fascist. Marcello is the type of person who just conforms to what ever society deems to be “normal” and at the time, it was normal to be a fascist. Later in the movie, he is seen to be outing a fascist to get the into trouble. With his tendency to change his position on Fascism, I made his shadow an anti-fascist/socialism salute to contradict his Hitler salute. In the movie, there was also a famous inscription on a wall, Res Gestae Divi Augusti. I decided to put that wall in my poster as it would be another reference to the movie. (The text on the wall is the actual inscription). I also began to play with the location of the director and actors/actresses names.
I decided to push the idea of having the names in the wall further, but change it back to a black background. The title did not seem to have the same thoughtfulness and effect as the other elements in the poster, so I played around with the title more (I did at least 30 different iteration of the title Here are a few.)
My final poster design is below. For the title, I did some more research on fascism and the time period and I discovered that fasces, a wooden bundle with an axe in the middle, was a symbol of fascism. It only seemed right to place that on the “I” in Conformist and have it bigger than the rest of the letters (because it doesn’t conform like the rest of the letters). I also decided to omitted “The” from the title because I thought the poster would not lose its value without it and for ascetic purposes.
In this concept, I chose to use the main character, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) raising his hand in the fascist (Hitler) salute. I changed his shadow to be a fist to represent the anti-fascist. This shows his indecisiveness and how he changes from being a fascist to an anti-fascist -- he conforms to whatever society deems "normal." The wall is Res Gestae Divi Augusti in Rome and I used the real latin text that was on the wall. Marcello stood in front of this wall during the movie. I added the actors/actresses and directors names into the wall. The title recedes in the same direction as the wall and the "I" is bigger than the rest of the letters because it does not conform like the rest of the letters. On top of the "I" is an axe, which is a symbol for fascism. I chose to removed the "The" from the title because of placement issues.