Friday, February 14, 2014

NatGeo Thumbnails (Senior Work 2.13 & 2.14, 2014)


My idea for our National Geographic-inspired movie poster is based on an article I read in said NatGeo magazine about a village of people living in the mountains of Georgia, a country close to Turkey. These people, Georgians, are made up of several different ethnicities, but they all share one common land: rocky, cold mountain, separated from society. These Turks are religious, mostly Orthodox Christian, and worship their god, called the khati. They participate in animal sacrifice to the khati, and they eat the meat afterwards, saving the most sacred parts for their god, such as the heart and liver. They consume a lot of rum, ritually by filling hollowed-out ram horns with the liquid and consuming it from that medium, and the village(s) gather for communal meals and prayer. They seem like a peaceful society, except for a rule of thumb they abide by: revenge. For these people, "an eye for an eye" is very important. These people are not barbaric or lacking manners, however; this is just their way of life, and they have done so for hundreds of years, and lived happily.
Based on this idea, though, I WANT to make these people seem more barbaric and evil. The Hostel movies by Eli Roth make the Slavic people look evil and torturous, and Eli Roth even received a lot of criticism because of his movies: the tourist industry in Slovakia and Romania dropped considerably after Hostel came out. That is exactly how I want people to feel about this movie. I want to strike fear and portray the Georgians as religious zealots who sacrifice humans to the khati instead of animals, and take the "eye for an eye" theme a bit further. My movie poster will show this through my collective series of thumbnail ideas coming together into one 11x18 preliminary picture. 


(Note: the first 15 thumbnails were for another idea I had involving the Earth running out of water, based on another article in the NatGeo.)



Preliminary sketches based on thumbnail ideas:




(This is the idea I went with for my poster painting.)




Friday, February 7, 2014