The second thing we agreed on took some time, we thought about possibly a courtroom may work, or barbed wire with a prison blurred in the background. We even thought maybe we could have the faces of our contributors on it. Given that most of the Netflix Documentaries had thier contributors (or topic of the doc) not only in frame but most of the time thier whole face. We started playing with the idea of having our contributors faces on the poster, different shading techniques we would use on thier faces, what background they would be on, but then we came across one question that put a bit of a stop to things. Because we have three completely different contributors how would we fit all thier faces of the poster without it looking like some kind of Queen album cover? Would having all of them on there look amatuerish? We couldnt have some on the poster and some not. This was arounf the time that the Michael Jackson documentary was released, and i saw a poster on facebook in the following days that i thought looked really impactful and suited our tone.
After discussing the fact that if we pursued this style of poster that first of all it would seem very biased and one sided and look like we are immediately coming into this with an opinion, but also we would have to do three seperate poster for each. Considering this we went back to the drawing board and really thought about the roots of this documentary, what it really is about. Yes mostly the emotional trauma of being falsey accused but it is also the factor that you may (or in some cases have) go to prison, which is where the fear and trauma stems from. So we knew that we would have to get something in relation to prison and edit it so that it looked almost scary.
It didn't take long to come to the conclusion that something that would look really good would be a prison cell. Both Eddie and Jordan two of our contributors have spent time in prison and Liam only narrowly escaped it, therefore we felt that a prison cell was definitely a good move. With this in mind as director and someone with a fair bit of creative input with the project i started looking for pictures of prison cells thta looked less than appealing, to get a sense of what i wanted our poster to acually look like.
I decided on these three to be my inspiration for the poster. I really wanted the grimey look of the dirty and rough brickwork, but i also thought it would be a good idea to that the cinematic look of the light coming through the bars and creating bars of shadow on the floor. I also know that when the place was found and the picture was taken that it should be a wide lense to make the room look bigger and emptier than it was, to imply lonliness and reinforce how isolated it would feel.
With this in mind i started drawing an amalgamation of the three photos above on Adobe Photoshop Sketch. Much much later and many thing erased and re-drawn i settled with the sketch below. I did want to keep the idea of a window however the logistics of keeping a window and having the light come down and shine on the words "Assumed Guilty" was far too complicated and may not even look that great after months of photoshop work.
I wasn't sure on whether to keep the brickwork behind the lettering in case the words got lost in the lines of the mortar and bricks, so temporarily i chose to fade the brickwork out at that point in time. I definely wanted to keep most of the bits actual prison cells have for example a bed, a sink, a toilet etc so that it looked like a belivable prsion cell. Once i had completed this sketch i sent it over to George to see what he thought and if he had any ideas on where we could photograpgh that either has a prison cell in or something that looks like a prison cell. After a couple of days trying to contact prisons (some of which we had already contacted to try and film in) it was very evident that no prisons wanted some students walking around filming or taking photographs. This was when i got the idea of finding out if there are any prison themed escape rooms, so i googled prison escape rooms and found a place called Prison Island. I phoned them up on a Tuesday and ask if we could come and look at the rooms and take some photos on the Friday (No photos were available as they had only been open for a week) and the man i spoke to who i later found out was the owner said yes there was no problem with that.
Come Friday we arrived, phoned up, had a small drama (explained in detail in my locations blog post) and finally got in and met the owner. After recce'ing the rooms they had we decided on the best one and well, TADAAAAA.........
When george had finished editing the photo we felt like there was something missing, so he suggested we write our contributors names on the wall and i agreed but suggested that we should write Liams name then cross it out symbolising that he in a way had his name down for prison but narrowly escaped.
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