Mercury Rising Finals & AMP entry & Evaluation

Mercury Rising Finals & AMP entry & Evaluation 

Presented here are the 2 screen prints I created on two different stocks. A light grey green and a light/antique white stock. 

The main concept behind the visuals is based on the synopsis of the film based around Simon cracking a secret government code. To present the idea of decoding & hacking I created my own visual sort of code based on interlocking shapes created by erasing parts from a square shape. These interlocking shapes present a jigsaw puzzle which has links with Simon cracking a secret government code through a puzzle book. The red lines are based on mayan numerical systems as the visuals of the simple linear elements and dots worked well alongside my shapes to create this final visual language. 

The colors used are influenced by the films genre and the films title. The metallic silver ink is inspired by the word from the movie title "mercury" and the aesthetics of the substance. The red contrasts nicely with this silver ink and red has obvious connotations with the films action genre and is the color of the common thermometer which contains the substance mercury so this is a more conceptual link for the 2 colors. The choice of stock for the final choice was antique white, this provided a good tonal contrast between the background and the imagery used compared to the more subtle contrast in the grey stock. 

Sent off the digital version and the scanned in antique white screen print for consideration for Alternative movie posters gallery.

Evaluation 

Was really impressed with the finals I produced for this, loved practicing the skill of screen printing as it is still something relatively new to me. And as mentioned it gave me the opportunity to simulate relevant visuals from the film with the use of metallic silver ink to represent the metal mercury.

I also enjoyed the process of creating my own sort of code language, I felt this really fit the concept of the film well and the language I created was quite considered and informed by lots of visual research and conceptual research looking into past ancient languages combined with simple visual elements like squares. This was my favourite part of it although I wanted to make the symbols appear like abstract code style glyphs, I did carry it out with Mercury Rising as seen in the development but they weren't very legible. But Im not sure this is a bad thing, if they became legible they wouldn't really simulate a coded language anymore so Im glad I scrapped the idea of making them legible glyphs or it might have ruined the whole design. 

Love the quality of screen printing, struggled lining everything up but once I managed after test prints the final product has so much more character than a digital print. A very rewarding process and I will be using unique print methods like this in the future for abstract concepts like the use of metallic ink to represent metals. 

If I could have improved anything on this project it would have been to experiment with color choice more in terms of stock and the type on the poster, i went with safe bets in terms of color and stock choosing a simple light and dark stock with a safe choice of red that obviously complimented the silver ink.