works before CertHE（2） poster design
I create three vertical posters and another horizontal one according to the film style and plots of TABOO. Poster Style: coldness, conciseness, killing
Elements: protagonist, Japanese sword, blood, cherry blossoms, handwriting.
At the start of the movie, the young and handsome Kanō Sōzaburō (Ryuhei Matsuda) is admitted to the Shinsengumi, an elite samurai group led by Kondō Isami (Yoichi Sai) that seeks to defend the Tokugawa shogunate against reformist forces. He is a very skilled swordsman, but it is his appearance that makes many of the others in the (strictly male) group, both students and superiors, attracted to him, creating tension within the group of people vying for Kanō’s affections.(from wikipedia)
The posters of the first version (the first one on the lower right in ‘poster outcome 1’)were used to show the protagonists of the film. I hided the face of the protagonists in the handwriting, aiming to indicate the complex relationship between the characters, meanwhile to reach the unity of film and taboo. In Hijikata Toshizo’s fantasy at the latter part of the film, Kano Sozaburo wears a deceptive red dress, so the overall tone was set as red, representing both blood and temptation.
In the vertical posters （the lower middle in ‘poster outcome 1′), I used the combination of patterns and fonts to unify the style. An inverted sym- metrical composition was adopted in the first version of the posters. Two swords are furthermore added to present the plots of in the later part as well as to demonstrate the night when Kano Sozaburo and his lover Tashiro were tussling. Kano Sozaburo and Tashiro show the most ambiguous but obvious relationship in this film, so I used two photos with similar angles to achieve a more balanced visual effect. And the fonts were also scrambled, interspersed between the blades.
The third poster(the first one on the lower right in ‘poster outcome 1’) is a description of the story. There is a very classic scene in the movie where Tashiro (portrayed by Tadanobu Asano) went to persue Kano Sozaburo in the middle of the night. I used two overlapping silhouette to illustrate the aggressiveness and passion for a man like Tashiro. The silhouette is also layed on a blooded knife, which represents the brutality of seduction.
Simple composition and expression techniques are used in the horizontal poster (the higher one in ‘poster outcome 1’), straightforwardly showing the plot development of the story. I combined the sword that represents killing and taboo with the handwriting fonts, in order to express the harshness of taboo. I then created the sword as blood stained, and added the pattern of cherry blossom in the blood, to indicate the killed Kano Sozaburo. Besides, since the overall content of the film is very dark, so a pure black background was adopted.