I’ve never see all of King Kong

Posted on May 24, 2011 by welldunn

Designing posters based on movies everyone have seen before is nothing new, neither is boiling them down to a few vectorized elements, setting the title in Helvetica, using a muted colored pallet and calling it minimal or retro. Not that there is anything wrong with it, it can be a fun little exercise. There are are even brilliant examples out there.

A while back, I had the idea of of doing a similar project, but with a small twist. Do a serried of posters based on movies I’ve should have seen big classic movies, such as Blade Runner, Cassablanca, Titanic, and anything by Tyler Perry. I want to avoid doing an overly minimal version of a poster  for example the first one I chose was King Kong, and instead of focusing on a single defining image, I wanted to incorporate that the movie went from a lost island covered in a jungle to New York City.

I’ve never seen the full, original version. It is a movie with such a solid place in pop culture I felt like a could whip something up that communicated all the elements of teh movie. I started by working up some custome letters. I based it off House Industries’ Tiki Island. I hand drew it without a reference, and got pretty close to it.

Then sketched out a rough layout …

then drew up the text in illustrator, illustrated the rest of the image and photoshopped in some textures.