Message & Delivery: Research

I was basing my posters on the article about Pussy Riot's court proceedings, I wanted to create my 3 posters around the idea of just questioning if they crossed the line or if they simply were expressing their freedom of speech through the act of the 'punk prayer'. I wanted my posters to be rather unbiased just so they allow for more free thought and questioning of the acts.

 I wanted through my poster to show 3 different points in the proceedings. I thought to take my image and text poster to be the starting point, so this would be the first poster in the series. It would be the act of the 'punk prayer' or simply one of their other acts of expression/performances. 

The 2nd I had in mind, the text poster to be rather in the middle, or act as the court proceeding poster. It's to be the middle of the 3, and act  as a counter weight when they're lined up.

 Leaving the 3rd poster to be image poster, and this I wanted to be the after math, them in the Gulag after they've been convicted and sentenced. Like this I thought it'd show some story line perhaps. 

This above design she was the first I produced, I used these to also create kinda like mood board things, inspiration boards. To then take into my thumbnails, I found this really useful, I was able to directly take minor hints from the inspiration. Especially the constructionist's  these were a major thing I wanted to play a part in with my work here. Especially the layouts.

I outlined all the images I thought would be great to cutout, or ones that would be best used in the posters or how i'd drawn them just to cross-reference it here. I found this real helpful as well, then I was able to directly know which bit it was I needed to cut out when it came into Photoshop and arrange them really quickly. I developed quite alot of ideas around a few concepts and this method worked really well.

I bought in my first image of pussy riot into Photoshop, I needed to make it black and white so I used the channel mixer to take out all the colour tones from the image and then I placed all other colour images under this layer to then see what they'd look like along with adjusted levels to work as part of the poster.

I really liked the effect it created, this above photograph was one of my favorites  I hadn't adjusted the levels so you can see how faded it appears. The arrangement they're all in is really powerful, It gets across the riot part, but also the act of freedom of speech, they're not doing much wrong. It comes out as a rather unbiased photograph.

These other photographs just don't get close to that however, they're not as a powerful.

I attempted to half tone the image, but it's not really effective enough, it loses even more of it's impact in the process.

I tried a colour gradient on the riot photograph  I liked the effect at first but I thought it was rather distracting to the overall aspect of the image, it worked alone really well.

I placed in my first piece of type, I believe in Arial, the arrangement really worked, but it just didn't have the umph. I looked on Dafont for a Cyrillic typeface to replace this and then I worked with that, which is available below: 

 'SF WADIM GIANT'

It's a great Cyrillic looking typeface.

I arranged the text how it's shown above and I when with that as my final piece, It's quite powerful, I added a multiply to the type, taking inspiration from the pictures I had used on my design sheets the multiply look really added alot more. It stopped the type from blocking them out and brought them back into the picture with a hint of red. Back to how I experimented with the colour gradient!

I started on my image poster here, I took a picture from a labour camp for women and cut them out, taking the aspects to how constructionist's worked with photo collage, I was trying to see this in the same light as that.

I then did the same to a picture of the fencing of one of the gulags, cutting it out roughly. I had to use war time photographs for these so the quality wasn't all that great but the result was better then I had expected it to have come out when I had them enlarged, I tried to use Illustrators image live trace to allow the images to enlarge more then they where possible.

I highlighted 3 of the women in the photograph as to represent the 3 women below; Pussy riot, to signify that they're in a labour came when the two images of the women and the fence was combined together.

I cutout a flag-bearer out of one of the Pussy riot photographs and combined this into the labour camp women, the flag is the feminist flag.

I took the image above, in Photoshop and applied the same effect I have done for the previous image where upon I used the channel mixer to induce the Black and White effect. I used the ellipse tool to then cut them out and then I applied red to them to change them to the same hue as the others. I thought this really worked well and was a create way to separate them from the main image and link them to the painted head of the labour camp women.

I then started on the type poster, alot simpler then the previous ones, now that I had my message all I had to do was to type it in, using the same typeface and angle as I had previously I was able to make this poster rather easily using Illustrator.

I added in lines to the typography to close it off from the rest of the page as it felt as if it was just floating about in the space, they finished it off well too.