A creative process is often long and sometimes full of curveballs and headaches. The creation of a movie poster can be as complicated as the process of filmmaking itself. Different approaches, tastes and ideas come together and need to be filtered into a final product that represents and speaks for the movie at first sight - in one single impression.
The artwork process for Sherpas Cinema's Into The Mind was stretched over nine month and started back in November 2012 when the trailer was released on iTunes and we needed a cover for the iTunes trailer page.
The story of the movie changed quite a bit through-out the 2 year filming and editing process and so did the artwork. The main question always was: What is this movie about? Skiing? Nature? Risk? Cycles? A little bit of everything. I came to the conclusion that the poster needed the films' protagonist as the center piece to speak to a wide audience and at the end of the day, sell the movie.
The triangle
Graphic artist Anders Petersen and I came together and started working on different logo types. Our goal was to create a logo that tricks the brain. Anders came up with the idea of a "broken" type, inspired by different ancient symbols. Even the the font characters are not complete our mind is able to read the logo as if nothing was missing.
Endless knot.
Anders is an incredibly talented artist and can put my vision on paper. It seemed a bit too literal but we played around with the idea of a brain that transforms into pillow lines. The movie and pretty much every Sherpas video is full of visual similarities and comparisons. And the poster should be a representative piece of art. Another center-piece is the prayer wheel that represents the spinning world but at some point it got too crazy and we pulled back from combining too many ideas.
Creating the composition
We refined the concept and narrowed it down to three elements: a) the protagonist: Mr. Purple b) the prayer wheel and c) the ultimate challenge represented by the mountains. I drafted a mockup with stock images and we decided to bring in Blake Jorgensen with the Phase One camera to shoot our talent. I wanted to make sure we can deliver the highest resolution on all media.
Artwork options.
