For this part of my contextual studies project I had to redesign the Wall.E film poster into an Art Deco style. This was part of a larger project where I had to design posters for Harry Potter and Snowpiercer.

I started out by doing a little research into art deco and was very surprised by what I found out. I knew it was a big design movement around the time of WW1 but knew very little else.

It turns out that Art Deco was the result of more affordable travel being available in the 1920s which allowed in situ exposure to other cultures. Designers were fascinated with ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica and so were inspired to take distant and ancient cultures and combine them with machine age imagery and materials. This created the modern style we know today as Art Deco.

I started out by looking for images of Art Deco buildings. I do this on Pinterest because it’s very easy to collect images. Art Deco has a very distinctive style characterized by rich colours, bold geometric shapes, stylized floral and sunrise patterns. So you would think it would be easy to design something in this style. It turns out it was extremely difficult.

I DESIGNED A MOVIE POSTER FOR WALL.E

There is a scene where Wall.E and Eva escape the Axiom. Wall.E uses a fire extinguisher to get around. I wanted to turn that moment into a poster. But actually doing it was rather tricky.

I spent a whole day working on this image of Wall.E at a quarter angle. As much as I liked it, it still didn’t look art deco-y enough. Even though it pained me to do it I started the poster again (and by this point I only had 3 days over the weekend to finish it).

I was very lucky though and found detailed blueprints of Wall.E which meant I could trace parts of his body. I find it interesting how Wall.E manages to look simple (he’s basically just a box) but when you really get into it he’s actually made up of many many small parts.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

This poster was a nightmare to make just because of how long it took. I pretty much did nothing but work on this for 2 days. If you want to put it another way, I managed to watch all 6 Star Wars movies in the time it took me to do this.

I really liked how this poster turned out. But I don’t think it’s very art deco. It has some elements of the style with the flat blocks of colour and straight lines, but I think it could have been more like Art Deco.

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