These posts will serve as a record for my group contribution to our seminar series – Fear and Loathing in Documentary.

Week 2 – This week I worked with the group brainstorming potential themes/titles for our seminar. Our working title was – The wolf, The crossroad and reaching grandma’s house. Although it is a little lengthy we felt it stuck with the angle we wanted to take with the seminar, which is focusing on how a documentary creator navigates the challenges that are thrown at them and particularly how they balance commercial and personal interests.

Week 3  – Helped brainstorming a new name for the seminar as the previous one was too long and too ambiguous to an audience that wasn’t aware of the topics. I thought that ideally should fit these qualities.

-attention grabbing e.g. spin on a title of a documentary
– gives the audience an idea of the topic (documentary)
– Adds to the theme (epic adventure)

– gives an Idea of the focus (commercial v personal interests)

in the end we came up with our current title – Fear and loathing in documentary, which is a spin on a title ,albeit not a documentary. It also perhaps gives an idea of the focus of the seminar (navigating the challenges of documentary makes). It does not however fulfil all the criteria, but realistically it would be very tricky to tick all those boxes within in a single title.

We also divided into sub groups, I ended up helping the poster and promotional material.

Week 4 – Seeing as I hadn’t actually watched the film this week I would view it so I could get a stronger idea of what kind of direction to take with the poster. After viewing the film I feel more confident in the title of our seminar as it gives us a very strong aesthetic direction for the seminar which I believe will be a lot of fun to play around with. Here are some notes I took on the visual style

– Dutch tilt, nothing is straight,

– strong diagonal compositions

– psychedelic colour sets

– warping distortion

– blood, drugs

– surreal aspects

– iconic imagery, desert

also met with my sub group to discuss what we wanted for the poster, we decide we would each come up with a mock up for next weeks class. Also drew some very basic ideas for the mock ups in class, we were thinking of two major options firstly something like this

simple because the image is so iconic

I also wanted to experiment with something similar to this

except warping the faces of the guests, although this would require some high quality photos of the guests as well as their permission to distort their faces and post them in public places.

Week 5 – complied some inspirational material (posters, fan art, frames from the film) on drive with my sub group.

Found a font called ‘Bat Country’ online which is a homage to the film and uses the same style, I decided to include it within my mockup as the word ‘documentary’ simply to test it out. I actually think it looks quite bad on the poster, its letter forms are too thin and it just looks a bit too messy.

before I go into more detail here is my mockup

 

Not all too happy with it in general but it is only a mock up.

I used a frame from the film which I though had a nice formal composition, it also had enough negative space for the text to be inserted.

I love the title lettering of “fear and loathing” I took it from this image

In our group meeting this week we decided that we all really like this lettering and that we would use something similar in our own poster.

I did also really like the colour scheme of this poster, the strong reds and purple sky could be very eye-catching.

Not sure at all about the font at the bottom, I couldn’t quite seem to get it on the right perspective plane to match with the hood of the car, also I defiantly think the font needs to be changed.

What I am a fan of is minimal text, I think our poster should primarily be visually appealing rather than informative, so I think that simply having the date and the location could be enough.

In this weeks meeting with the group we shared feedback on each others designs, discussed potential copyright issues and divided up some more tasks for the next week.

We decided to create some new mockups, I am going to look into where and how we can print the posters and Adjeet is going to experiment with Gonzo sketches and try and replicate the lettering of the title text for the word ‘documentary’ so the title is more uniform.

We also discussed potentially having two poster designs, one to catch attention and then going back later and replacing the poster with another that is more informative.