Image - Self Directed Brief

As explained earlier, I wanted to create 10 A2 posters featuring Bill Murray quotes for the self directed brief. I started by getting the final quotes:

• "You'll never know if you're any good. And you'll never be any god if you don;t know that you are"
• "Do You have an alternate? Are there priests on call?"
• "More mysterious? I'll just try to think: Where the hell's the whiskey?"
• "Thanks Mike, I'll probably quote you on that, but I'm going to take this opportunity to retire from the world of basketball"
• "Why worry? Each of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back"
• "Son of a bitch, I'm sick of these dolphins"
• "I'm a god. I'm not THE god. I don't think."
• "Sometimes a bowler just has to face the music"
• "Zombies don't mess with other zombies"
• "She's my Rushmore, Max"

Next I started roughly mapping out what I wanted to do with the quotes. I started by using the "You'll never know if you're any good" quote from Get Low. I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do with the words, which was to try and create symbols or objets that are relevant to the film or subject of the quote using the characters of each word. 

I came up with these ideas for laying out the poster and went with the rounded grave stone idea. It relates well to the film as the film is about undertakers and an old man dying. Next I came up with a few different ways to do the poster.

First i mapped it all out by hand using pencil.

Then I went on to go around the type in fineliner.

I also tried a version where I filled in the letters to make the type bolder and to fill in the gaps in the symbol a bit better. At this point I was undecided which of these would work best in the final posters.

So I moved on to the next poster.

This quote is from "The Royal Tenenbaums" so I immediately thought of royalty to relate to the film. I also thought about using a cross to represent the priest mentioned in the quote, but finally decided on using the royal orb that would come as part of the royal orb and sceptre. 

I worked out where each of the letters would go as above.

Then outlines them to make them neater and stand out. At this point I realised that the type was all very uniform and caused a really blocky curve around the orb. 

So I decided to try extending some of the letters and bending them to make them fit the contours of the shape. 

I then filled it as with the example above. At this point I knew I had the theme of the posters sorted which allowed me to work a lot quicker and with fewer steps. 

This quote is from "Lost In Translation", a film which is centred entirely in Tokyo, Japan. The two most obvious things I could think of were Tokyo tower and the rising sun red spot of the Japanese flag.

I settled on the red spot and laid it out and produced the image above. 

This quote from "The Life Aquatic" immediately made me think of the red Zissou hat and of fish. I went for the fish as the more recognisable of the two.

Laid it out and drew this above. Then I pretty much followed this pattern for each of the quotes. 

This quote from Ghostbusters only ever had one real outcome.

The quote from "Groundhog Day" made me think of the sky and the clouds to represent the mention of God, so I didn't take much time thinking about it. 

This scan shows quotes from both "Space Jam" and "Kingpin". It would seem obvious to use a basketball to represent the "Space Jam" quote, but as I had a lot of circular thing going on already I decided to go with Murray's basketball jersey number featured in the film. 

For this design I created one of the 2 shapes and then traced it over again to make sure that both were identical. 

I also realised that I didn't really need to keep filling the letters as that should (theoretically) be easy enough when the posters were vectorised. As for the Kingpin quote, I went with the bowling pin as I thought it communicated bowling as best as possible. Plus the fact that the quote literally says 'bowler'. 

Similar to the '22', I drew half of the bowling pin and then turned it over and traced it to make sure that both sides were symmetrical. 

Next was the film "Rushmore" which is one of those films which isn't particularly about anything at all. I found this difficult, but focussed on the 'Rushmore Academy' school that features in the film and the bees that Max iconically lets loose on Murray's character.

Using the same method as the bowling pin, I created this beehive. I then went on to try and add the type and fit it into the hive. 

You can see that it obviously didn't work brilliantly and the shape doesn't resemble a beehive at all. I considered this a failure and started again using the idea of Rushmore's shield instead.

This worked out much better but turns out to be a bit less interesting. I kept the design anyway.

Last but not least was a quote from the film "Zombieland". I found this difficult to work with, but eventually settled on creating a zombie-like head/ skull shape.

I used the same symmetrical drawings method and created this design above. After finishing this one, I realised that the posters could maybe have some kind of cover. I thought there could be a kind of prologue to say what the posters were about etc. So I created this.

The image is based on Bill Murray in the film "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" which is my favourite of all his films, so I thought it fitted well. 

Now that I had all of the actual designs, I used Illustrator to live trace the hand drawn posters so that I could resize, retouch and colour them. To start with I wanted to see which looked better out of the line drawn type or the filled type.

Although the filled type looks bolder and in this example fits better to the link with the Japanese flag, I still prefer the line drawing as it looks more detailed and subtler. So I decided to stick to the line drawings. I also decided to use red and blue as the theme through the posters, as the colours seems to fit well in a lot of situations and most importantly they work perfectly for the Steve Zissou front poster. 

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