Film poster

This project is a film poster design for 'The Imitation Game'. Before begin designing, I delved into the understanding process of the film and begin from an research essay.

In the movie ‘The imitation game’, games have run through the whole story in numerous ways. One obvious element is the crossword puzzle. From code breaking to puzzle solving, it features the game against time in the WWII. The crossword puzzle is published in the newspaper with an invite to readers to solve it within twelve minitutes as to recruiting smart people to Alan’s team to crake thre enigma code. His machine is the only hope and determine people deaths at the time. As the Germans were changing the Enigma settings daily, which is impossible to sloved by human brains. Alan and his team need to solve the code by the next enigma code comes out. These also features the battle of wits between Computing Machinery and human brians.

Another remarkable content metaphor with games is how Alan hiding from the police detector with his secret of being a homosexual. The police detector have appear in the very begining scene and along the movie, which uncover- ing the truth through the plot, also enhance the social conflict faced by Alan at the time. As the British government during the time institutionalized heter- osexism, Alan have to hide his secret in his whole life and seen as abnormal. During his childhood, he was seen as odd and discriminated even he keep his secret. At the final scene after winning the war, his truth have been exposed from the police detector and was forced to either take hormonal estrogen drugs to be “cured” of his homosexuality or go to jail for two years. In his late life, he was still hiding from the society and forced to hide in the closet to pre- vent people seeing him as mental illnesses.

My initial idea is to combine the crossword puzzle with the movie name. By overlaping the letter ‘A’ between the film tite, it also represents the initials of Alan. The man portrait is Alan, covered his face by the movie name, features how he have keeping secret in breaking the Enig- ma code and being as a homosexual. The portrait was in suit as man in the movie mostly wear suit, it also create a serious effect. The code-liked text ‘alan turing’ spread besides the portrait, which hint with the code breaking scene.

Visual elements like the plates are pointing and leading audience to the focus point of the movie title. Joan is looking at Alan with a cocerning emotion while Alan was looking at the angle of the exploded building, representing each person caring different aspect in the plot. Lastly, I come out with the final design shown below after correcting with few mistakes in word spelling, image accuracy and text allignment. I also create more focus point to Alan by adding lighting on him using gradient colour.