Hello again. Today, we are going to look at the promo for Eiffel Society’s New Years Eve party called, “The Last Masquerade”. This would be the first NYE celebration at Eiffel so we had to make it stand out and memorable. If you don’t want to go into detail, just skip to the end of the post to view the completed work.
First, I want to post some snippets of the email that was sent to me:
Donkey,
We are going to have a masquerade style New Year’s Eve event at Eiffel. Think “Eyes Wide Shut” meets “Metropolis”. We are going to decorate and create a futuristic ambiance based on the movie Metropolis. I’d like you to create the promotional imagery based on this movie as well… the movie has a distinct and appealing look that we want to mimic.…I think this is a fitting look considering that Eiffel is still such a new place… we want to set the bar of the future on NYE with this party. We’re going to have femme bots and aerial dancers and encourage everyone to dress up in suits and cocktail dresses with masks… a lot neat stuff going on during this event. It’s an all-inclusive event… buffet style food plus open bar.
…I want to put this is in your head so you can start brainstorming and flex those artistic muscles of yours.
…Let me know what you think.
*There were also links and attachments to some Metropolis posters for reference. And yes, people really do call me by my nickname. Even clients.
My reply was basically, “Man, that sounds totally awesome” and I was on my merry way to do some research. To my surprise, the whole Metropolis movie is actually on YouTube (sans the lost footage). So I sat and watched it to absorb what I can from the film. Then I decided which poster would look best for the promo.
My plan was to redraw everything (while still taking inspiration from the poster) and replace a few elements. I started off sketching the robot (which I later dubbed “Maria-bot” in email replies). The idea to add a venetian mask was discussed later in a phone call.
Then I studied the typography for a bit and looked at its structure. There’s no official font for the Metropolis logo (that I know of), so I had to try to recreate it as best as I can. As you can see, I had to make a minor change to the “S” as it was conflicting with what I wanted. You can ignore the miscellaneous sketches and the notes about sloppy joes.
The layout was sketched out later in a thumbnail. It’s basically a mirror of the Metropolis poster: Logo at the top, some buildings below the logo, the Maria-bot towards the bottom, and some copy below that. For the buildings, the idea was to put the Eiffel Society building in. Of course, that would require me to also redraw the Eiffel Building. Using a photo would break the feel of the entire imagery.
And so, it was off to Illustrator to do some illustratin’. Here is my first rough draft. Notice the mask has not been added yet. The logo and copy were just placeholders. Also at this point, I haven’t started drawing the Eiffel building yet.
The initial response was positive (thank god!). Now on to rendering the mask, logo, and the Eiffel building. The mask and logo was easy. The Eiffel building, however, was a different story. As a piece of the Eiffel Tower, there’s a bunch of beams and steel shapes that surround the building. At this point, it was like redesigning a comic book character to be animated in a cartoon show: remove some details while keeping the important ones.
Here’s an image of the outlined rendering:
This took quite a bit of time as there were a lot of reordering layers, combining shapes, and aligning objects. In the end, it came out really well. With that done, I can now move on to the other things.
Here’s the raw illustration in Illustrator (with the logo and mask finally rendered in):
There’s a reason why the ribbons for the mask are extended out like that. I’ll just post another snippet from a related email. There were some photos of masks attached, hence why “solid metallic silver” was mentioned:
…One of the masks shown (solid metallic silver) is provided to convey a possible additional graphic element: the mask should be more along the lines of the ornate one’s shown, but the element I wish to express with this image is the way the ribbons used to tie the mask are laid out in both directions. If you think something to this effect might be worked in, with the ribbons bleeding off the flyer, and perhaps lining up with ribbons on the reverse that meet there in middle, tied into a bow, around which additional text can be placed. The effect is that the flyer itself is wearing a mask.
Very cool idea, right? I thought so.
Now it’s on to moving the illustration into Photoshop for some effects. Nothing really special was done to it. I just did some layer masking, texturing, and a good ol’ drop shadow for the logo.
Here’s the final design for both the front and back (click for a closer look):
Here are the printed versions (click for a closer look):
It was also printed in a magazine:
Last but not least, I also had to design a ticket of sorts. Not worth going into detail but check it out:
The whole process went pretty smooth due to precise direction. I really enjoyed doing this project. The event itself was quite a hit. Or so I’ve been told. I couldn’t go due to a few circumstances (namely, other friends wanted to do other things and there were like a million other NYE parties in the area). You can visit Eiffel Society’s Facebook page to view photos from the event here.
Hope you guys enjoyed this “look” post. The next look will be about my workspace =)
Tags: eiffel, last masquerade, metropolis, new orleans, society