Process

A poster for Rope, a short film by Lucas Manuel-Scheibe. The film charts two love stories, Aki and his partner Ji, and his grandmother and her husband generations apart. The poster design draws from scanned magazines and stills from key scenes in Rope, alluding to the confusion of identity and the ambiguous landscape of memory which play out through the short. 

Originally working off the motifs of doubles, we decided to focus the imagery of the poster around Aki’s grandmother and her trade as a diver. These images obscur the face and body of Aki’s grandmother, using the setting of the ocean as a proxy for Aki’s memories.

After experimenting with 3D rendered pearls and rope, we pivoted towards scanned images. The texture of the paper and print align with the historical roots of Rope’s plot. Superimposing these scans over images from the film allowed us to bring out the mystical nature of Aki’s memory of his grandmother.

(1) Development of background and type for one version of the Rope poster

Outcome




Rope