This movie poster is for a screenplay entitled "Nation of Beasts," which is a dystopian film based around a very simple but morbid premise. The city in question, New Shasta, is enforced by its own people and armed with the city's very limited weapons laws. As such, the people are relatively quick to cull the heretics that endanger the public peace. These people are directed to apprehend and/or use lethal force when they are directed to by a government announcement. The general theme is meant to be a relatively futuristic city with a calm "everything is ok" mood, with something clearly wrong going on in the back.
To create this, I used primarily Adobe Illustrator, which is by far the software that I am most familiar with. I did go through a couple sketches on purple Post-It notes, which tends to be standard, and from those sketches I came up with the idea of using two-halves of a face, one with a wounded smile and the other with a mask. Since a lot of media tries to show a villain/antagonist by obscuring the eyes, I decided to put the title text where the eyes would be. That way, the eyes would be hidden for a logical reason, and it would also make compositional sense. I imported the text and industry logos/ratings from a photoshop document. I used the image trace function to create proper illustrator objects out of the imported images so I could change the colors and such. The other main detail was the background- I was worried that creating a background in Illustrator given the time I had would be difficult to execute, so I used a stock photo of a city in portrait taken by Izuddin Helmi Adnan. I lowered the opacity down to 20% so it would would still impart the setting without being too loud and stealing the focus.
Related website
