The assignment was design an alternative movie poster. The choice was difficult. The options: Bladerunner, The Science of Sleep, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. All great films with their own personality and visual style. I had been meaning to rewatch 2001 for a while. Certain scenes from the film really stuck with me. It's minimalism appealed to me. I wanted to work with a similar visual economy on this poster.
When I watched the film again, it was with pen and pad in hand. I paused to take notes on the plot, the settings, the themes. Viewing with a closer eye on such details revealed so much that went overlooked the first time. I had a lot to work with for mind mapping and sketching ideas. I knew I wanted it to be minimal. I knew I wanted to feature the Monolith. And I knew I wanted to incorporate the Stargate Scene and its color palette.
The Monolith is the catalyst to all events in the film. It is portrayed as the progenitor of sentience. It inspires the expansion of the mind of mankind and drives its evolution, which drives the plot. It only appears a few times in the film, yet is central to everything. So it would become the central focus of my poster.
I used it as a framing device in several of my sketches. Different scenes, characters, or thematic images were contained within the rectangular frame. The scene that remained the most vivid in my mind was the climax. When David is intercepted by the beings who made the Monolith, and he enters the Stargate. After the slow burning pace and lack of color through most of the film, this bright burst of psychedelic color is entrancing.
The rectangular frame that represents the Monolith is the same dimensional ratio of the ones in the film. Using two stills from the Stargate Scene, I created a composite image using blending effects in Photoshop. The colors burst forth but are contained within the frame, as if it were a window or door to someplace beyond all comprehension.
During the sketching process, while experimenting with the shape of the Monolith as a frame I drew both inside and around it. My instructor, Julia McNamara, urged me to explore this idea further. To create an inverse of original and make the piece of diptych. I followed her advice and believe the piece is even stronger as a set.
The second piece which inverts the layout is like a view from the other side of the gateway. The pieces seen side by side offer views from within and without. The "Minimal" poster's dominant white border symbolizes the ordered and enlightened, the brilliant chaos of the universe contained as if it could be possessed or controlled. The "Maximal" poster symbolizes the journey through that brilliant chaos towards some shining ideal, as if there is an ultimate understanding that will satisfy our need to know the truth of all that is.
