Wild Movie Campaign

BACKGROUND: Wild is a 2014 movie based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir that chronicles her experience hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. The task was to redesign the poster for the movie and create an accompanying website for a marketing campaign to promote the film.

DESIGN PROCESS: I began by pouring through hundreds of pictures of mountain scenery in order to find ones that would be appropriate for this campaign. The poster is a composite image that consists of four separate images that were combined in Photoshop. This process involved a lot of trial and error in order to find images that looked cohesive together. After I settled on the images, adjustment layers were applied to help blend them together. Since the movie takes place in nature, I wanted the color palette to reflect this. I used the images of the misty forest to represent the struggles that the heroine faces, before emerging stronger into a brighter, more hopeful world. For the title of the movie, I created a handwritten logotype that had a “wild” feel to it. Throughout the project, Baskerville is used as the primary typeface. I used InDesign to make the website and mobile page, which both use a part of the composite image as the backdrop. For the website, I used a smaller image of the main character hiking, with a line that represents the trail. The mobile home page is even simpler, due to its smaller size.

DESIGN SOLUTION: The poster clearly gives viewers an idea of the movie’s plot, with the main character being the focal point against a backdrop of forest and mountains. When compared with the original poster, this one stands out at more modern. The website and mobile page repeat some of the elements used in the poster, while maintaining a more minimal design so as to make it easy to navigate.

SOFTWARE: Photoshop, InDesign