For this project brief we were tasked with designing a series of posters to promote a retrospective viewing of a film director’s career, in my case the early spaghetti westerns that make up the ‘Dollars Trilogy’ famously directed by Sergio Leone.
A project I thoroughly enjoyed as I am a huge cinema follower, the BFI film festival brief was an extremely exciting project as I could potentially produce designs for any of my personal favourite film directors. Eventually I decided on Italian film director Sergio Leone. To represent his trilogy I wanted to take an aspect of each of their aesthetics, firstly for the design of ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ I wanted to use a dark and dirty wood grain to capture the more brooding and violent chapter of the trilogy.
For the second film; ‘For a Few Dollars More’, I decided on a lighter colour inspired by the visually brighter cinematography as well as the richer towns depicted in the film. I also placed the text on a torn sheet, much like the ‘wanted’ posters seen throughout. The final chapter was the most challenging: however the finale to ‘The Good, the Bad & the Ugly’ takes place in a vast graveyard, so I decided on depicting the text as an inscription on a gravestone. For the typography I wanted the typeface to appear consistent throughout the series, fitting perfectly within the context and making them appear recognizably as a set to the viewers. The solution I found was using antique letter-pressing characters to create typography both stunning to the eye and appropriate to the settings of all three films.
Developed from a design brief set by my university tutor. Created for non-profit.
