The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, on a wet, black bough.
- Ezra Pound 'In The Station of the Metro'
I decided to use the name of the haiku for my fake movie title. I started off by googling ‘Movie Poster’ and looking at what came up as inspiration. I also googled ‘Metro station pictures’ as at this time I didn’t realize that the photo needed to be my own. I had the idea to use a specific royalty-free image from creator Giuseppe Milo on Flickr and to have areas touched by light be a colour on the opposite colour wheel than shadowed areas - as knowledge of the colour wheel had to be prevalent in the work.
I created 6 colour versions to share with people.
People seemed to like the top left as the words were easier to read so I used the feedback and reworked the piece to be more readable. I also had an idea to make the ‘names of actors’ and pseudo quotes be going down the stairs. Only after creating this version of my poster did I realize two things: it was not the correct dimension and the photo had to be mine. I decided to start again.
I tried to make the image into a square drawing. I wasn't pleased with how it looked with and without the text.
Still taking the idea of the metro and ensuring that this new poster would still be as readable as the last, I decided to take stock images from the internet and turn them into flat shapes. The usage of contrasting colours would make these shapes stand out, and I could get around both being stuck indoors during quarantine and also not being confident in my own photography. Using a stock image of people walking to the left, I cut them out individually so I could position them where I wanted.
At first, I was using the colours black and yellow because I liked the contrast. However, feedback from others made me realize it was more ‘taxi’ than ‘metro’. I decided to go back to my original colour scheme of blue and yellow. I also shortened the title at the direction of a couple of designers just to make it more commanding. This new poster is quite a change from my original idea however I some of the feedback from the old poster helped me with this new one - so I don’t regret the mistakes at the start. I was trying to achieve a bold look as is shown in the haiku. Ezra purposefully used two lines to deliver a bold message and I wanted this to be shown in my poster as two halves of a whole.
This is the final.
