Introduction
As a fan of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise and its influences on the culture of games and RPGs I wanted to create a different take on the key art that was done for the movie, Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves. In this project I take a deeper dive into the DND world and get a better understanding of the audience and ideate creative that matches what I think the audience is looking for. This project started out with designing a movie poster that I expanded into a campaign with marketing across social, physical and digital. My role in this project is both the creative and the designer where I ideated and executed the ideas as how I would think they would fit in a real world setting.
Problem
While the movie was a success and the key art for movie posters were good, but I think it was too generalized. Doing research you can see in places such as Reddit where there are comments that the marketing for the film made the movie another blockbuster generic action movie when Dungeons and Dragons goes deeper with its lore, story and themes. With a committed fanbase I would imagine a movie that was made specifically for them should also target them in terms of marketing.
Goals
I believe that there was more room to lean into the DND world throughout the marketing to satisfy the committed fans while making it interesting enough for the general audience to want to know more with the charm that this game brings. That is why in my take on the key art my goal was to lean into the idea of storytelling, facing challenges, fantasy, and comradery. Ideally I want to bring that world building and the story of DND into the marketing to make it more engaging.
Research
For research I rewatched the movie to get a better idea of the world building that was done in the movie such as settings, major events and get a better idea of the characters. I looked through all the movie posters to get some inspiration as well as look over artwork that is made for Dungeons and Dragons including the MTG card game special expansion to get a sense of the game and their message. Takeaways I got were that there was an interesting set of characters with backstories, portals, fantasy, creatures, a dragon, teams and adventure.
Movie Poster Ideation
While I was ideating drafts I would grab inspiration from the artwork from the DND player guide books because I wanted to match the similar idea and feel where a players were straight in the action of it all. I wanted to play with portals or doorways to create an idea of an entry for the viewer to look into. I also tried playing with actual elements from the game like the idea where.
Movie Poster Ideation part 2
The key art I decided on was in a sense a more literal approach to a dungeon and dragon where a group of adventurers come across a gate and beyond that is a looming dragon waiting on the other side. The team is in the underdark and gnome forge which all reference specific places that they went through in the movie as part of the world building. I used the gnome statues and chains and the settings that were done in the movie. I created the center of the gate to be this bright orange red color as a focal point where the dragon is to draw attention to the center and in contrast the silhouettes of the adventurers. The poster also nods to a reference to one of the early Dungeons and Dragons player manual artwork where it depicts a large orange statue of a demon and a party investigating. For the movie title I was playing around with different ways to depict the movie logo and type. Because the Dungeons and Dragons franchise is a well known brand and I wanted to leave it as is and not replace it with a different logo, but I still wanted to change it up. Ultimately I altered the logo to match the setting of the movie poster in the top of the rock kind of “adapting” the logo into the setting which I end up doing in other parts of the campaign because like in every DND campaign the settings are always changing but the logo stays the same. The poster was made from photo bashing images together from scenes in the movie and assets and using photoshop to edit the look and color together.
Character Posters
For part of the campaign I wanted to do character posters. My initial thoughts were to create wanted posters since the movie focused on the idea that the cast were all thieves. The movie taking place in a midevilish kind of time made the idea of wanted posters to make sense because this is something you could see as a prop in the game or something that exists within this world. I added an element of graffiti into the posters to help add characters and curiosity to the cast. For example why is Chris Pine’s character labeled innocent but also a traitor? It gives a little bit of information, but also not giving too much and in my head these could be used as posters to advertise the movie in public.
MOCK UPS
