Graphics essay so far far

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How has cinema influenced contempory artists? The first artist I am looking at is Olly Moss; who is a English graphic designer from Winchester. He explores numerous creative mediums such as: comic books, t-shirt design, posters, video games and branding – while only being 31 years old. Moss never had any ‘traditional design training’, instead he studied literature at the University of Birmingham; making him a self-taught Graphic Designer. Thus, why he saw art as a hobby as he gets to create designs on his interests, with him stating – “I was really interested in films”. From this fascination of movies he has produced works spanning Star wars, The evil dead, An American werewolf in London and multiple Studio Ghibli films; with his ‘My neighbour Totoro’ poster being a personal favourite. This Shows how cinema has influenced Olly Moss’ passion for Graphic design, with it being at the forefront of his creations and without it, the majority of his works would seize to exist. Olly Moss was heavily influenced by film early on in his design career; which started with him delving into a crowd sourcing website called ‘Threadless’. His earliest designs are found on this website, but one in particular that was ‘solely’ around his love of movies was – ‘Spoilt’. In this design we see numerous iconic film spoilers, making it one of his most “complained about” and popular designs on the website. However, he defended himself, stating “I tried to make most of the references vague enough so you’d need to have seen the movie to understand them” – and this is the first example of his ‘art style’ of discrete references used throughout his work. You can see it being used in his first initial poster works on movies; in which kick-started his career of movie poster design. These first films included; Taxi Driver, Die Hard and Rain Man – with the posters showing how his original influence from cinema came from the context/plot points of particular movies. From these designs he obtained his first ‘real job’, working on the movie art for ‘The Losers’, which caught the eye of bigger opportunities such as the film – ‘ The Evil Dead’. He was notably influenced by the atmosphere of said film, resulting in him portraying this in his poster art for the movie. Additionally, in his creative process he was inspired by other artists such as Daniel Danger and Dan McCarthy, commenting on the “sense of depth” they used “with such a limited colour pallet”. He shows this in his final poster design, consisting of oranges, blacks and white; although, he used bolder composition compared to McCarthy and Danger. And this movie profoundly influenced his minimalistic art style used in numerous of his later designs, such as his ‘Star wars’ posters. Furthermore, he has used cinematic influences in his latest art show – ‘sillohettes’. Here he plays around with the likeness in characters that are ingrained in today’s society, with multiple revolving around films. Among them are; Top Gun, Spiderman, Die Hard and Pinocchio – portraying them to specifically coincide with the character’s persona in the film. For example: broken glass for John McClane (Die Hard), Spiderman placed upside-down and Pinocchio’s nose expanding to a second frame. This shows how cinema has influenced the style of each character, with the majority of his silhouette designs not of been created - if cinema did not exist. Moss has taken a different approach most recently, by trying more complex designs compared to his previous minimalistic movie posters. This led to his ‘The Simpsons’, ‘Legend of Zelda’ and ‘Mario’ posters; showcasing his advanced art style. Although, they’re not directly linked to films, he took inspiration from the old black and white movie ‘Title Cards’, as he wanted to distance himself from his previous minimalistic method. This shows how old cinema, has an expansive influence on contemporary art, as it is


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Graphics essay so far far by Izzy Hatt - Issuu