As my time at Ulster University comes to an end, we are to finish our journey with an end of year show. The aim of the show is to display our final animations to potential employers, members of the public and our peers. Throughout the year, Timmy Magilton, Marks Smith and I have all been working on a short 2D/3D animated film. Our end of year display will be focused around the theme of our film. Our film is based on a vampire hunter in the wild west so it would only seem fitting to create a display centered around that theme. Early in the project my main priority was to come up with various different poster designs for our film. Once we knew what idea we would be pursuing I researched different poster designs for films based on the wild west theme. I wanted to get a good reference for how a film poster should be laid out and how negative space is used. One of the first western films I looked at was Unforgiven. I liked the poster layout with the main character’s silhouette to the right hand side of the poster, leaving the left hand side to be filled with other supporting actor’s faces and some background imagery. Another movie I looked at was Django Unchained, which is a personal favourite of mine. I liked the style of the poster where the page was dominated by a silhouette of the main protagonist, but within the silhouette is a landscape imagery with a horse, all done in the film’s colour palette.
Another poster I looked at was for the film The Lost Boys. This poster was my favourite of the ones I referenced. The page had vampire teeth at the top with the background imagery of a destination from the film, looking like it was being swarmed by bats from below. I liked the style of this poster and how clever it was to utilise so many aspects of the film into the poster. This poster was a great reference for my main poster.
For my fist poster, I drew inspiration from the Lost Boys poster above. I had consulted Henry prior to starting this poster to make sure I could change the design enough to make sure it was not too similar to the original artist’s work. I drew sketches with different vampire teeth at the top, with the landscape of our 3D modeled town just below. I drew the silhouettes of various town props including, the windmill, church, clock tower, gallows and train station. Then for the lower half of the page, instead of the swarm of bats I coloured a black silhouette of blood dripping down onto a sand background with the film’s tagline. The title was place in the blood silhouette and I included some bats in the scenery image below the teeth. I came up with the tagline “As the sun sets, the stake only rise…”. I had a few variations of the line but ultimately stuck with this one. I got some inspiration for this from a similar line online, but tweaked it and changed it up a bit to fit our film. I had been brainstorming a couple of taglines, but liked this one the most so I used it on all my poster variations.
This was my main poster, using The Lost Boys poster concept as inspiration. My second poster also took inspiration from one of the previous movie poster references, Unforgiven. I really liked the style of the poster and the layout, especially how the negative space is used and how we can see the main character dominate half the poster while also seeing all secondary characters and the villain. Below is my second poster based on the Unforgiven poster style.
I used the same tag line at the top and had just the silhouette of the town in the background as the protagonist stands in front. I then put the title of the film in large, bold font in a western typeface. In total I created five posters. The other three posters mainly took a notable prop or building from the town and used it as a backdrop. I made all seem eerily derelict with no people or other props but just the sunset behind them and bats.
I went very minimalist with these ones and just included either the tagline or the title to accompany the image.
As well as working on posters I did some planning on how the table display would look. For the large poster we went with a design Timmy had created early in production. This was his design:
As for the table, I purchased a saloon/wild west style table cloth to throw over the table. I also purchased small western table confetti that can be spread over the table. Lastly I bought a prop sheriff’s badge to place by our art book or the monitor. Timmy would get the characters from the animation 3D printed and also have for display on the table.
I also went back to my CV to make any corrections to it that Alec had previously suggested. To remind myself of these corrections, I went onto blackboard and looked at the feedback for Professional practice module of last year where my CV and Show reel was being marked. It was on the ‘Marks’ page where I found the feedback video with suggestions from Alec on how to fix up the CV. I re watched the video and made the relevant changes. It was not serious, just fixing some spacing issues, and being more concise in my wording.
I also added the link for the new updated Show reel to the CV.
When updating my show reel, I followed the same process of looking back over the show reel feedback video Alec made last year, and from that I made the necessary changes Alec had pointed out. The biggest change was rearranging the order in which clips were being shown in the show reel. Alec had pointed out that I should show my best work first so I shuffled some clips around and cut some that didn’t need to be there. I also rendered out some older animations to make them better quality for the show reel which was another suggestion from Alec that made the show reel look better in terms of quality. Lastly I added the new rendered shots from my Major Project animation film.
For our display tables we also needed to produce an art book. This would feature artwork from all members of the group, collated into a book for a viewer to look over while at our table. Timmy, Mark and I had designed posters and concept artwork throughout the year so we had plenty to fill a book. I asked the team to send me all their artwork that they wanted featured. I went onto Snappy Snaps, a company that deals with photo printing and other similar services. On their website I was able to compile our chosen artwork into a photo book in the order of my choice and purchase it. A few days later it was sent to me. Below is digital layout of the book:
Back Cover
One of the main strategies I took to promote my work is LinkedIn. I had never used LinkedIn before this semester and created a new profile. From there I started to post concept work, poster and the final animation when it was finished. The reason I chose LinkedIn over other sites such as Instagram is because of the professional connections LinkedIn has to offer and I feel that it is a great site to use for growing my network and branching out to more people in the animation sector.
The last thing to focus on was the decoration of the table.
I spread the table cloth over the table, displaying the saloon logo. I then spread out the small wild west confetti decorations around the table cloth. I set the art book roughly at the bottom middle of the table with the CV beside it. I then went out to a costume shop to buy another few things as I felt there was not enough. I bought a cowboy hat and a gun and holster to also decorate the table. Lastly, Timmy bought a belt buckle and another gun to place at the top left of the table to fill the space. The monitors were then placed at the top and the poster was put up to complete the display.
This was our finished display table.
Overall I’m happy with how our Creative futures project has gone. I took any feedback and used it to improve on aspects such as my CV and my Show reel. I was able to create a variety of poster designs and could gather props that fit in with our theme and were used to decorate our table and make it more inviting and appealing.