The Assignment: Create a movie poster that captures the essence of the story through the use of minimalist design/iconography.

The results:

The process:
This was made in Adobe Illustrator (sorry GIMP, I don’t yet understand your path tool). I scanned in a quick sketch of the seahorse, done from the smaller image on the left. I uploaded that into Illustrator and traced the outline with the pen tool. From there I simplified the path to around 80%, which is what makes those lines look way more elegant than I would be able to make otherwise. On a lower layer, I uploaded the background image (a paper texture which comes from here) and adjusted the color.  On a separate layer, I added the text, in Futura Hand from dafont.com.

The coloring was a bit trickier — I’m used to doing black and white line drawings in Illustrator, but that’s about all I’ve used it for.  I used the pen tool again to make a loose path around each of the areas which would have color and then filled each one with color, turning the opacity down to about 30% so that they didn’t look too glaring.  After those were all done, I moved the outline layer above the color layer to hide all the rough edges of the color splotches.

As for the imagery, the film features the kind of standard disillusioned middle-aged life crisis dude, who ends up trying to reclaim joy and creativity and all that jazz.  Only this time the fellow in crisis – Steve Zissou, played by Bill Murray – is an oceanographer.  He’s at a failure of a movie premiere when a little kid gives him the rainbow colored seahorse.  The bag the seahorse is in gets punctured when Zissou gets into a fight shortly after, so he dumps it into a wine glass as he walks away from the premiere.  If I had to reduce the movie to five minutes or so, that scene would be the first, marking the start of the transition.  I really wanted to have the seahorse in a wineglass for this poster, but dear lord I have been spending way too much time on these.