For my final design assignment, I chose to do the Minimalist TV Poster. I thought a long time about which movie to do; I had really wanted to do an older movie, but I couldn’t think of any (that I’d seen, at least) that had a simple enough iconic image that I could use for a poster. I decided to just look at IMDB’s Top 250 Movies list for ones I had seen.

I selected City of God, which came out in 2002. In case you don’t know anything about it, it is about two boys growing up in Rio de Janeiro through the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an atmosphere of violence and gangs. One boy grows up to be a journalist and photographer; he is represented by the camera. The other boy turns to drug dealing and violence, and he of course is the bullet – aimed at the camera. It’s a really great and very intense movie, so I tried to keep the poster as simple and stark as possible.

As for creating it:

I used these two photos for the bullet and the camera:

I used the lasso tool in GIMP to cut them out of their respective pictures. For the camera I put it into black and white and used the Posterize tool to remove as much color as possible. The posterize tool didn’t work as well on the bullet, so I just put it into black and white and heightened the contrast as much as possible.

Fonts have been my problem all week, and they were a problem for me today too. I just couldn’t find one that I felt fit in with the image of the movie. I settled on simple Verdana, a bold sans serif font. I thought the poster still looked too empty, so I added the text at the bottom for a little context. The original movie is in Portuguese, which is why I mentioned that there are English subtitles.

Fun project and a great movie – I may have to watch it this weekend now….