The more traditional printing methods such as litho printing, screen printing and although not that old, Risograph printing have been something I have been interested in expanding for some time now. The feel and finish they give lend themselves perfectly to the trailer as it cements that lowfi, hand made feel often associated with ancient China and HKC.

Now that I have agreed on a pretty conclusive direction for the artwork and overall aesthetics I think its a good time to start thinking about final promotional artwork and what that might look like. For this first version I have been thinking about the image in terms of an A3 poster. Drawing on what I have learnt from my previous post about war and conflict artwork I tried to set the poster up with this in mind. This first version is heavily inspired by Fig. 3, split frames depicting multiple images that imply they are from the film itself. However, as I do not have to create the film, I can be a bit more abstract with the images, making sure they really communicate the message of the film. The bottom image, which is my favourite is a shot looking up at the female, or a female protagonist with bamboo forest behind. The idea being that she is towering above you the viewer showing her power and strength, suggesting she might have just floored you. The dynamic nature of the image is also inspired by the documentary photos of the Vietnam war. Ive been really thinking about this influence more and more, in particular what feel it lends the artwork, in this instance I think it is just enough, same with the above image. Action is implied through their dynamic nature, rather than just a female character looking at you, she is somehow mid action, or in the case of the bottom image between actions. Like the Logan poster I think, I have not shown violence, only the parts before or after. In a similar vein as the first half of the trailer, the viewer connects the dots rather than me showing a women literally beating down on a man.

The colour choice of the poster, red and black was in keeping with current, overall design strategy of the trailer. By keeping it all pretty much the same people are able to recognise that its artwork from the film without too much trouble, it is also so bold you cannot fail to miss it. The Lowfi, almost punk nature of the poster really gets the message across brilliantly I think. I have to say though I wish the artwork, or paintings of the figure came out slightly better. Next time I will probably clean up the artwork a bit as a lot of the strokes have lost detail through the exposing stage. It's not a total fail, but id prefer it to look a little more cleaner. I think I would also add more layers next time. These are all aesthetic changes however, I am pretty pleased with the artwork selection and the message this gets across, I will however play with composition a bit more next time, maybe it doesn’t need two frames, I don’t know that it adds more to the message of the film, could just be the title and an image. The title is actually very strong, I think this has printed so well possibly because its quite bold and the more bold something is the better it screen prints. However the chinese characters have quite a lot of texture on the and that has come through real well.

Fig. 4 is the tracing paper print out that was exposed onto the screen, it is a close up of the detail that I got from brushing black ink. However, in fig. 5 you can how much of it was lost, it either went completely black, or a light half tone for the lighter parts. There seems to be a fine margin for this process, in other words large parts of the brush technique haven’t done this half tone, most have gone black or nothing at all, so what I should do in future is thinking about adding a half tone myself, This way I will get much more detail.