Julius Mattsson

I was very excited about this school assignment from Hyper Island. I hadn’t done many posters before and was very anxious tog get started. I started out by thinking about the whole movie as a concept and tried to pin down one thing that was sort of generic with the movie as a whole. What I came up with was that I wanted to convey a sense of documentary rather than fiction. Even though the movie is based on a book it deals with very real problems going on in modern day Italy. I wanted to come as close as possible to representing factual statements, opting to go for a grainy background and Courier as my typeface of choice.

Different prizes that the movie has won, Cannes included, was shown to give credibility to the movie. I wanted to get as far away as possible from the “Hollywood” type of feeling which glamorizes violence.

The most important pieces of the graphics were put in Black color to symbolize weights, this including who directed the film and the title of the movie.

Skimming through the movie to find the most revealing scene; this is what I came up with. I think it represents the movie in a good way. What are these two young boys doing out on a riverbank with machine guns, in their underwear? It captures people, it makes them look twice and gets them thinking.

The title was set in the “Armada” typeface because it has a sense of weight to it. At the same time, its rounded features make it seem authentically Italian. That’s the very essence of what I wanted to capture with this poster; authenticity.

I didn’t want it to look like yet another action movie — because it isn’t another action movie. It depicts the reality of criminals in Italy. It’s not glamor in the Hollywood way; it’s the raw reality where life has no meaning and whoever holds the gun does the talking.