Work-in-progress photographs from my recent poster design, created for the Don’t Panic contest to produce a film poster for Norwegian Wood – directed by Anh Hung Tran and based on the novel by Haruki Murakami.
As some of you may know from previous work based upon Murakami’s writings, I absolutely love Norwegian Wood, it’s my favourite book – not just of his, but of all books. I wasn’t much of a reader but his books broke me in to reading, in a sense.
Below you can find preparatory images created during my design process. These show my laborious and time-consuming approach. First I brainstorm on paper, then sketch a few initial ideas. Next is the research. A lot of research. Hours of it. Sometimes the best idea will emerge while walking to the shop or drifting off to sleep – I always have a journal handy to scribble it down.
Next stage is to combine research with ideas and create the characters, it can take a long time and a lot of practice to produce a likeness of a person, if I’m lucky enough to do that at all. Each element is worked on separately, scanned, edited, and the whole lot woven together (in Photoshop) to create the final image. I’ve included some of the ideas that were dismissed due to a lack of time, would have liked to explore them further for this contest.
Here is the final result:
EDIT:
As a lot of searches for the contest winner have led to my blog, I’ll mention here that the winner was announced yesterday on the Norwegian Wood Facebook page as Bertie Simpson with this poster. It was the second highest voted in the contest, and looks fantastic! See his blog here. I also really like this poster design by Lucie Rauer as it evokes the atmosphere and emotion I felt when reading the story. More of her work here.
