STALKER -- Super Trash

Here's something I've done as a submission to Floating World Comics' Super Trash film festival -- a poster for Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, one of my favorite films.

If you're familiar with the film, hopefully the imagery here makes some kind of thematic sense. The film is about - in the simplest terms - a journey to a room that is purported to grant your deepest wishes. At one point a broken light bulb appears in the film; I liked the familiar notion of light bulb = idea, so I started with that, then enlarged it to represent the room where ideas become actual.

I wanted to evoke the slightly psychedelic Eastern European film posters of the era (60s-70s) so I threw a watercolor wash behind the drawing that hopefully suggest this, as well as imitating the color palette of the film: mostly greens and blue. The film is also filled with water imagery, so I left the linework transparent. I experimented with color in the light bulb and logo, but I wasn't as pleased with the results.

For Tarkovsky's name I questioned if I should simply use one line near the logo, or somehow design his credit to further suggest the film's images and themes. I repeated the line of text until I had a block of text that looked less like words than it did the tangled rows of electrical wires, fencing and train tracks that pattern the film. However the image was a little harshly edged as it was, so I faded it into the color as you see here.

Were this a DVD or book cover, it would be neat to have the three figures on the spine; as it is here, I wanted them to be as isolated as possible with nothing but empty sky above them.

Everything here is hand drawn and lettered, but this is the first time I've assembled all the bits in Photoshop -- it's a bit daunting but I can certainly see the advantages.