The Creative Process Behind My Saul Bass Inspired Movie Poster  

For my Stylized in Saul Bass Movie Poster Project, I knew right away that I wanted to use Gone Girl as my movie. The plot of the movie, the characters, the underlying message all seemed to create this perfect concept that I believe that Saul Bass would have loved. There was the right amount of intrigue and mystery to the movie that I knew that it would be amazing for this project.  

I started out my creative process by brainstorming ideas with my professor, and we were able to quickly narrow down what the main messages I would need to convey with my imaging to make the poster truly in line with Saul Bass’s style. These were gaslighting, manipulation, and weaponized femininity. From there, I started to truly think about how these concepts were represented throughout the plot and what would be the best way to convey them through imagery alone. I settled on the idea of using the marionettes - a central clue for the main character Nick concerning his wife’s disappearance - for conveying manipulation. It was easy to decide how to incorporate the main characters once the idea of the marionettes was cemented in my mind. Of course, Amy would be the ones pulling the strings and Nick would be one of her puppets. This imagery only solidifies the concept of her ultimate manipulation of Nick during the entirety of the plot.  

Conveying such concepts as gaslighting and weaponized femininity was more abstract. I had to really think about what those were, how they were intertwined in the plot, and who was more prone to be subject to them. In the end, I decided that both were central to Amy’s character, as it’s through her diary and the recounting of her “life” that we experience the gaslighting first and most strongly. The weaponized femininity is also directly tied to Amy. Her machinations setting up the perfect murder scene and suspect in her husband, from befriending her neighbor for unseemly reasons to manipulating a college sweetheart to take care of her after she’s been robbed are all shown through the lenses of a woman who knows how to use her sexuality and identity to her advantage.   

With these things in mind, I went about drawing my initial draft of the poster. The hand-drawn draft is a lot different than what I ended up with for the final Illustrator version of the poster. In it, one can see that while the idea of the marionettes with Amy pulling Nick’s strings are still central to the design, I only showed a portion of Amy’s body and face, focusing more solely on her hands. Nick is still a puppet on her strings, but he is much more central to the poster while Amy seems to be more of a background character. In my final design, I have Amy standing in the center of the poster, much more central to the image to notate her role in the plot- how she is the mastermind behind the events and how she purposefully stepped into the situation. I have Nick smaller and more the side, while still being on the strings. I added bars for Amy to hold, since it was more in line with the idea of marionettes and would allow for a more natural line placement. I decided to add Amy’s little smirking smile to from the hand- drawn version to the Illustrator version since I think it adds a little more depth to her character just from the poster- she is smirking because she knows what’s to come for Nick, and because she is enjoying watching what is happening to and around him.  

At the time of drawing the rough draft for this poster, I hadn’t selected all my colors, even though I knew I wanted to incorporated green and a pale yellow. It was through discussion with my professor and classmates that the idea of utilizing a particularly feminine shade of pink was pitched, and I decided that it would fit into the color scheme quite nicely and would add an unexpected pop of color. Once the final color choice was selected, I was able to quickly connect the colors to the emotions and concepts. A vibrant pink for representing both Amy’s femininity and representing her gaslighting- seeing the world through rose colored glasses; a dark shade of green to represent the jealousy and unhappiness that is at the root of her actions; a pale tint of yellow to contrast between the two and represent Nick- apathetic, angry, and exasperated by his wife’s antics.  

It was always in my mind to have the characters as an outline, since Saul Bass was particularly fond of using cutouts and negative space to create his posters. I believed that keeping the piece simple would better convey the concepts I was trying to impart, rather than add a bunch of frivolous detail that could potentially clutter up the poster and lose the message. I also decided that instead of having my movie title set apart from the imagery, I would incorporate it into the design, similar to Bass’s The Shining and West Side Story posters. In the end, I had to hang the movie title to the other marionette bar and I decided that rotating the letters for “Gone” would be a good way to signify the twistedness and unnatural circumstances surrounding Amy’s disappearance, while keeping “Girl” straight and exacting would convey that Amy- the girl in question- was straight-laced and in control, not a hair out of place.

Overall, I am very proud of how my poster turned out, and I think it is noticeable that Saul Bass’s works were a source of inspiration. The balance given to the design by utilizing line, color, and size is my best use of the concepts I have learned in this class so far. I truly thought long and hard about this piece and I think it shows in the design.