Culture Mirror: Dying to survive
The last project in our module was an international competition, during which we had to make a poster for a film from a foreign participating country and develop a brand identity for the film’s promotional campaign based on it.
I chose the Chinese film «Dying to survive» (2018), based on which I made a poster. We were also given words from the movie industry, and «close-up» became mine. So when creating the poster, I thought about how to convey the meaning of the film through this technique.
The film is a heavy moral drama about cancer patients, poverty, debt, death and the desire to profit from someone else’s grief. In the poster, I wanted to convey the heaviness of the film’s atmosphere, the theme of illness and anxiety, and the frustration felt by the characters.
Therefore, the poster is based on details that are often repeated in the film: a medical mask, wide-open sad eyes and a composition that looks like a mix of both a pack of pills and a pack of cigarettes that are constantly smoked in the frame.
In the brand identity, my poster can be disassembled into separate elements and techniques, such as: handwritten text on top of a photo of the eyes, repetition of horizontal layers. Plus, in my identity, I actively use wordplay with «dying to…» like the inscription «dying to drink» on drinks or «dying to see» on the case of glasses.
