Blog Post #7

 

    For my mini multimodal project, I decided to make a movie poster for Dry. I thought about all of the different formats and what elements of each appealed to me. The movie trailers in particular were fun and interesting, but I shied away from making one myself since we already saw a few in class specifically for Dry. Looking at other mediums I liked such as zines and PSAs, I got the idea to combine elements of each of these mediums and make a movie poster. Before I started, I had a few things in mind that I wanted to achieve with this poster:

• Use shades of humor while still conveying the grave circumstances through urgency and seriousness. This is something I noticed the book did quite well. 
• Give the viewer an idea of each character's personality without spoiling/giving away too much. 
• Create a poster that is visually cohesive and remains faithful to the book. In other words, though I was making a movie poster, I still wanted to make a poster which could be appropriately used to advertise or introduce the book. 

    With the finished product, I think I achieved these three core goals. I used canva to create the poster, which was generally pleasant to use, but my main gripe with it was a lot of tools that it provided were behind a paywall. As a result of this, four of the five character illustrations are watermarked which is lame. Beyond this though, I will give credit to canva for it's vast yet easy to navigate toolset that it provides the user. All of the graphics, fonts, and images were as easy as searching or clicking around for your desired tool. I tried my best to get character illustrations that were both cohesive (keyword tried) to each other while still resembling the characters of the story in some ways. I think the characters that mimic my internal interpretation best are Kelton and Jacqui. This is mainly due to their physical features and their posture/stance, such as Jacqui's sassy and aggressive presentation, to Kelton's shy yet approachable personality. 

   

    Beyond this, I knew the pictures alone wouldn't be enough to tell the viewer which character was who, so I included their names along with a short descriptor. I found this to be harder than I first expected, as certain characters differ depending on if we look at them outwardly, versus how they portray themselves from their own perspective and point of view. For example, throughout the book, Jacqui reveals that she doubts her strength and abilities to make tough decisions, while the other characters see her as a "badass" type character who is capable of anything. With this in mind, I defined each character through how they were viewed from an outside perspective, and not how they viewed themselves internally.

    Another struggle I had with this project was maintaining a balance of visuals. I wanted to make something that looked half decent and also gave the viewer a good idea of what Dry is about, whether in movie or book format. At one point, I had a water faucet graphic along with some fire illustrations, but however I orientated them, it just made the poster look too cluttered and busy. I think one of the best visual elements of my poster is the background, which helps the title stick out while also maintaining the tone/style of the book. Without the background, I just had a red/orange gradient background which fit the theme of the story but looked a bit unprofessional and was too clean/friendly for the story. 

    With the multimodal approach, I think the process of brainstorming and creating the poster very much amplified learning. Although canva provided me with a lot of useful tools and resources, it was still up to me to pick and choose them and then arrange them in a way which I was happy with and fit the book's already established identity. I would definitely consider having movie trailers/posters as an assignment in my own class, as it would give students an opportunity to think back to their experience reading the book, and force them to be selective in what they choose to then create something artistic while remaining loyal to the story covered in class.