A New Look for a Wharton Movie Classic

The challenge was to design an original poster advertising a fictious movie or redesign the poster for an existing movie. I chose to redesign the movie based on a favorite book, The House of Mirth. The original novel by Edith Wharton is set at the turn of the century and tells the story of Lily Barth as she navigates the social and financial structures available to a single female in the high society of the late 19th century. It has several interesting plot twists, if you haven't seen it, I recommend!

The House of Mirth movie poster designed by Wendy Steckler.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

I decided to design the poster by overlaying a number of different images from the movie over the profile of the main character to provide multiple layers of information in the design. From afar, the viewer might only recognize the main character while a closer look reveals the other elements in the multi-layered design.

The images below are the raw images from the movie that I used as assets to create the composition.

Lily Bart

Lily on a New York street.

Lily arriving to New York via train.

Lawrence Selden, Lily's love interest.

Bertha Dorset, a sometimes friend to Lily.

I used photoshop to layer and mask each raw image, revealing only the portions needed for the final design. Using the profile of Lily and as outline, I positioned each other image within the her profile and used blending treatments to ensure a consistent look and feel across the entire composition.

I added smoke, texture and an overlay of emerald green to add visual interest and unifier across the entire design.

THE FINAL DESIGN

The final design is a multi-layered composite of the secondary characters and settings of the movie embedded within a solitary profile image of Lily (the main characters).