Idea Behind Spec Project
The principal idea for this movie poster project was to create a poster design that gave off the opposite vibe of the movie it was designed for.
The film I chose to do this spec project around was Alien (1979) from director Ridley Scott. Just looking at the initial release poster for the film, it is clearly designed to elicit the terrifying sense of the movie: possessing a lot of dark black coloring to emphasize the isolation of space, with the green mist emitting from the egg to highlight the mystery of the film’s monster.
To elicit the feeling of an opposite genre, I set out to create a poster that portray Alien as a family-friendly pet film: treating the titular Xenomorph like a dog that holds a special bond with the human characters of the film (like Ripley), framed in a comical and wholesome way. The posters I took some inspiration from to design this new poster were Pete’s Dragon (2016), Dog (2022), and Space Buddies (2009).
The elements, from observing these posters, that I sought to incorporate into my new poster for Alien (1979) were a cartoon-like fonts, light coloring, featuring the Xenomorph in a non-threatening way (like having its head come out a window), and the main protagonist (Ripley) alongside the alien.
Design Choices
The image of Ellen Ripley I used hails from a promotional shot of the character created for the film (retrieved from Wikipedia), and the Xenomorph came a generic promotion shot of the Alien franchise (retrieved from movieweb.com). I tried to find images of the two that portrayed the two in a “non-threatening” manner, or more simply, in images with bright coloring.
The image of the escape-ship from the film’s end came from an image of a toy from Google images, with a stock image from a car window being added later through Adobe Photoshop in order to create a space by which the Xenomorph could pop-out of the ship in a manner similar to that of a dog in a car.
I took a generic, image of a light blue night sky (again from Google Images) to serve as the space background, and also added a photo of the planet Neptune to stand in Acheron (the planet on which the Xenomorph was found) from Google Images, as all the film-images of Acheron were covered in shadow.
The fonts used in the poster are Marker Felt (actor credits), Bungee (title and date), and Iowan Old Style (review-quote). As mentioned, these font designs were utilized due to their family-friendly and cartoon appearance (Marker Felt and Bungee) or to imitate the review-quotes scene on actual DVD covers (Iowan Old Style). The review quote comes from an actual review on movie quotes.com for the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
To finalize the family-friendly image this new poster elicits, I added the MPAA rated “G” rating, with the G being made green.
This project was created in October of 2022 using Adobe InDesign.
Mark Burbridge 