Cape Fear Poster

This poster design responds to Stephen Frankfurt’s poster for Rosemary’s Baby; in my essay, I concluded that the main reason the poster is successful is not because it communicates a strong theme like Saul Bass’ poster, but instead because it is visually stimulating and very eye grabbing. I picked Cape Fear to do the movie poster for because it had the potential for an eye grabbing poster, and also, I saw the existing poster and thought it could be improved.

The image of De Niro’s character ‘Max Cady’ standing with his arms out with his back tattoo on show was the perfect image for the poster; It is an exciting and captivating image adding an element of drama but also mystery as one might wonder who the person is. It also represents this idea of the balance of good and bad and truth and justice, which is a prominent theme of the movie. I experimented with the image, using a non edited version and just doing a simple poster with the top half of the poster contains type, I then edited together water ripples in the back and lighting coming down towards the figure - visually captivating elements which are representative of the story and ultimately attain the same visual titillation as Stephen Frankfurts poster does. The next few posters show experimentation with colour, type and layout. Red is very attention grabbing and can be evocative of movies with an element of fear in, while the pale green is quite eerie. The typeface ‘Benguiat’ is quite retro and dramatic but ultimately, the typeface ‘Eurostile’ worked better as its a bold sans serif typeface, but doesn’t take too much attention away from the image. The layout for this final poster, filling the page with the image and using a banner at the top for there type is quite evocative of comic books, which does add that element of excitement whilst giving the image total prominence in the composition.