INTRODUCTION
How would a modern day campaign of John Carpenter’s Halloween look if it was released today? I was inspired by the movie Halloween and it’s iconic killer Michael Myers to make my own take on a movie poster and a campaign to accompany it to help bring an older era of movies to a new generation.
CREATIVE DIRECTION
The theme of the campaign is from a stalker’s point of view. Michael Myers is a killer known to stalk his victims from afar and watch them without them noticing his presence. He might be behind a bush, in your closet, some portion of the room where it’s dark and hard to see and I wanted to use that idea as part of the campaign. In this day and age a stalker can be very real and scary for many people when they’re walking on the streets alone and I wanted to use that to create fear for this horror campaign.
RESEARCH
I dived into looking at many movie posters in the past and in the present and noticed that there is a trend of simplicity in horror movie posters. I noticed that creepy cult movies will have serif fonts and that the ones with a killer use more of the san serif fonts. Red and black seems to be the go to trend for many of the color schemes and playing with the contrast in colors. With that information I have a guide of how my poster should look for a horror movie.
MOVIE POSTER IDEATION
While designing this poster I came across different problems that would evolve the poster in a specific direction. In my first round of drafts I tried playing around with the ideas of stalking and memorable scenes with the movie where Michael would magically show up in places and disappear. I also wanted to do something graphic because knowing this is a gorey kind of movie I wanted to emphasize that or the idea of a pumpkin being stabbed to represent the potential victims. Out of all the ideas I liked the knife idea the most with imagery of Michael in the reflection in the neighborhood with a graphic splash of red with blood that dripped leading the viewer to look at the title. For me this idea was supposed to mean that the real killer is Michael stalking you. It was minimal and I was happy with the results, but this is kind of where things took a bit of a turn when I remembered that blood is not allowed in movie posters and when I did a little bit of more research I found out that certain violent imagery is not allowed. Being committed to the idea already I was trying to find ways to alter it to see if I could play on censorship. I tried changing the color from red to orange, but it seemed a bit strange with the knife alone. That’s when I incorporated imagery of stabbing into a pumpkin to see if the idea shows enough implication while not being too gorey. It made me think that there was too much attention drawn to the pumpkin and I wasn’t the happiest with the title placement. That’s where I started playing with vignettes to see if I could take away some attention from the pumpkin, and eventually lead to the final idea where the portion of the mouth that was covered would be where the Halloween title would go to represent the mouth.
KEY CAMPAIGN ASSETS
Title sequence - I wanted to design a title sequence that would accompany this movie poster. I storyboarded some ideas for example doing Michael’s mask and fading in and out of sequences, doing a point of view of different scenes where he would be stalking and a remake of the original. I chose a remake of the original because it was such an iconic title sequence that I wanted to see how it would look updated and the other concepts didn’t fit too well and looked too much like crime television. For the updated version I used the same assets I used to create the poster and did it in a simple animation of zooming into the pumpkin, animating the eyes and mouth to glow to show that it’s not completely static and sound effects to create atmosphere and a looming presence walking towards before fading out and showing the movie title.
Poster series - I created a set of movie posters that would lead up to the coming of the movie by taking the concept ideas I made in the title sequence. I took the vignettes from my original poster design and applied it across the designs while making each one in a night time and dark setting specifically in the point of view of the killer to hint that something is watching or coming.
Social Advertisement - I made an animated variation of the movie poster for social media by creating a story behind the imagery showing Michael fading in and fading out. I used similar ideas that I did for the title sequence to keep it cohesive, but changed it up a bit to make it more interesting to watch for a shorter time period since most people scroll very quickly these days on their phones.
Step and repeat - I designed a step and repeat for a movie theater setting where people can take pictures with a cutout of Michael Myers in his neighborhood. This is partially a personal take, but I would think Michael would be a popular character that people want to take a picture with that would be fun and interactive with. Having him in his menacing stance in the middle would creep people out, but with other people around him it would make a fun photo op.
MOCK UPS
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MOCK UPS *
CONCLUSION
This project took some turns here and there, but I think for me it evolved in ways that I didn’t expect at first such as stumbling into censorship issues and having to make changes that I wasn’t completely sure about at first. Over time I think this project came together in a way where I enjoyed how it turned out. Ideating a bunch of ideas did help me because I was able to reuse some of the ideas in a different way than what they were intended for. Thinking about editing down and keeping the ideas simple was helpful enough that I believe still gets the concept across or the theme of stalking. I learned a lot from this project especially getting to explore playing around with horror.