In this blog post I will share my poster two design procedures including photos of process and brief explanations.
Initially, I was going for the movie titles "Realization" or "Falling Star" because I thought these would be the most suitable ideas to express in a movie poster. In my first thumbnail I solely chose my focal point as the facial expression of the female protagonist and the strokes were meant to signify shooting stars around her. Nevertheless, I then realized the message of the haiku would not be fully conveyed this way so I did not run with this design and moved on to the second idea generation.
In the second thumbnail I tried to apply a centered vertical composition as I was going to place the female character slowly falling down to the bottom with the movie title "Falling Star" placed in the middle of the page (as shown in sketches, the second photo is only meant to show general composition so the x marks are where the figures are supposed to be). However, I then found myself struggling to present this composition decently in a square format and at the same time, emotions would not be fully focused on as well, which was not my intention. Therefore, I also neglected this idea.
In the process of exploring the third idea, I found out that the principle of movement perspective were quite successfully shown. Simultaneously, the facial expression of the protagonist would also be more clear as the focal point, which would give the design a strong sense of emotions so I made my final decision to refine this concept and make it my final design work.
After refining, evaluating and asking for feedbacks from peers, this is my final movie poster. The reason why I did not put too much text on the poster is because during my research process, I found out that most anime posters mainly focused on imagery, movie title and the name of the director. The title of my movie is in Japanese on the right corner with the English translation underneath and the name of director (Makoto Shinkai) is on the bottom left corner. I chose to use this director's name because I personally could relate my illustrative style to his.