— Mina Bach

I had always wanted to design a film poster. I don’t like when film posters are used for book covers at all. First, it’s lazy and second I believe they are a different language altogether. A poster first lives in the streets, usually on a ‘as-big-as-it-gets’ scale and you rarely ever get to have it on your hands, carry it in your bag or look at it for too long. They serve a completely different purpose and I feel they should be designed keeping that in mind.

So I was very excited when I heard Don’t Panic had an online competition to design a film poster for Norwegian Wood, the film based on Haruki Murakami’s novel. I started getting into the story straight away: the characters, their surroundings and what they’d be exposed to visually. Set in 1960s Japan, I looked into posters from the period and found this amazing collection on Aqua Velvet (more on Sandi Vincent’s absolutely amazing flickr) these are my favourite. Bold, colorful, to the point:

First rough playing around with the idea of origami love triangles, one of the main plots in the story. Decided to incorporate their faces to make it more relevant and introduce the actors, each coloured face made out of the other faces’ colours all mixed in a seemingly ordered chaos:

Final design and the different colourways. Struggled to decide which colour to go for and when I asked a good friend for advice he said that it was not about what worked in the design but what worked in the story. So true!

So I went for the pastel orange, half manic half sedated. If you have a minute please vote for me HERE!  The top ten posters will be displayed in central London at Curzon Soho independent cinema between March 4th and March 25th 2011. It’s my birthday on the 2nd so it would be a lovely present too. The winner will also be distributed in Don’t Panic packs nationwide, imagine that!.

Feedback, as always, very very welcome!