Student Documentary Visual Identity

 

Date: November 2023

Inspiration:

    My friend asked me to come up with a poster and the graphic direction for the elements in their documentary Long Live The Kings, a mini documentary about 3 drag kings in Montreal. The package would include a poster, title card, nameplates and credits.

    After watching the documentary and seeing their drag personalities, as well as how they perform I wanted to go for a punk X medieval look to the visual identity.

     I leaned heavily into the punk look for the poster, combining the title card black script font with helvetica and courier as the body text:

    I chose a classic black script font for the main title and paired it with a modern mono-spaced black script font for the credits and nameplates:

Title Card

Rolling Credits

How I did it:

    I used photoshop to collage the poster together. Adding textues and elements to make it look like it was a handmade collage.

What I'm Proud of:

    I love how the poster came out and once it was printed it looked even better. Printing it in just black and white on 20lb paper gave it an extra level of texture to it.

    Also movie title screens are a huge inspiration to me so it was fun getting involved in a project where I was given the reigns to execute an idea like this.

To Improve Upon: 

  As much as I like how it came out, I really don't like copying older looks or styles of things for the aesthetic alone, in this case the punk look. I could argue that it fit the narrative of the doc as the kings are quite punk but it felt weird to me. Albeit, I only had a weekend to get all of this together and seeing as I wasn't getting paid I wasn't going to lose sleep over the fact that I didn't create a more complex visual identity. Going forward if I were to be involved in a project where I pulled elements from punk photocopied posters and graphics, I would want to do it all physically. When I can work like that I feel good about borrowing an aesthetic, it feels more genuine to me as opposed to just slapping effects on something in photoshop and calling it a day.