About three weeks ago I was asked if I would be interested in designing a poster for an independent movie called The Exquisite Corpse Project. The movie’s director, Ben Popik, told me, that the basic idea behind the picture was that he gathered five comedians and tasked each of them with writing a fifth of a script for the film. The catch? They could only read the last five pages of the previous part of the script.

The idea was very intriguing and I jumped on the opportunity to design the poster.

I wanted to employ a style similar to what I did with my The Thing and The Witcher 2 posters, but the overall character had to be much brighter and more defined. 

The concept stage was quite hard for me, because of the unconventional nature of the film. I took me five days to understand that… what I was trying to achieve would just not work :)

The initial though was that I should concentrate on the scenes, but after the concept stage I new that focusing the piece on characters was the way to go.

After I was done with the concepts (which I’m not going to show here, since they are utterly embarrassing) I started to work on the style.

At first the piece was supposed to have a very cartoony feel, but it somehow didn’t fit well with the movie itself. 

Therefore I went for a slightly more realistic approach that still gave me leeway when it comes to shading and details.

The whole thing was done exclusively in Illustrator and I’ve created more assets that I actually used in the final piece.

It took around 90 hours to put together and the final piece is 27″x40″.

While working on the poster I learned quite a lot about creating characters, shading and composition, and I had a ton of fun :)

The poster was designed in such a way that it has a screenprint feel, even though it will be digitally printed. I will probably create a variant with a more limited colour palette that could actually be screenprinted. 

The premiere of the movie will take place on June 2nd at the Dances With Films Festival in Hollywood. 

If you’ll have a chance to watch the movie, do so, because it is all kinds of awesome. Also check out the movie’s website here

Check out the trailer