Howl’s Moving Castle Redesign

My final project for my pre-press printing technique class was to redesign any movie of our choice, where we created a new movie poster, popcorn bucket, drink sleeve, and a souvenir.

You may have noticed from my past Studio Ghibli-themed project for my color design class. Still, I’ll repeat it anyway: I love Studio Ghibli! Those who know me well know that my favorite movie of all time is Howl’s Moving Castle; I could talk about Studio Ghibli for days, as I wrote a whole research paper about it in my dual enrollment English class in high school, and that drove me to read the book that inspired the movie (which was equally as amazing but also really made me understand some scenes of the movie so much better so I highly recommend).

Ramblings aside, I, of course, chose to redesign it for this project. Whenever I started this project, I created rough drafts with a soft pastel look that was a bit too similar to the original poster, which was the opposite of my goal.

So, I headed back to researching for inspiration online. I wanted to create a design that encapsulated the magical feel of the movie but had never been done in any official posters. After a few hours of designing, I came up with a completely different concept that accomplished these goals.

Still a draft, but quite different from where I started! I knew I was on the right path here, but it was still flat and needed lots of refining. So hours and hours of revising and developing later, I reached a final version of the poster.

There are lots of additions to explain here. While the illustration in general has much more details added to it, I also went and changed the background to a photograph to add more variety to the poster, rather than just having it be an illustration. I liked the original font I was using, but it wasn’t capturing the whimsical feeling I wanted to convey, so I used the font as a base and added more flares and sparkles to it because, of course, this is a movie about a wizard at the end of the day. The movie credits were a template provided by my professor, so I just had to fill in the information I found from my research, and then it was done! Well, at least, the poster was. I still had a popcorn bucket, drink sleeve, and souvenir to create as well.

Putting together the three-dimensional objects was honestly one of my favorite parts of this project. We haven’t done many other projects yet where we had to assemble so many assets of our designs, so it was rewarding to see my artwork come to life! I spent many weeks folding and gluing countless drafts, dealing with flipped or unaligned prints and faulty design ideas. Most of this is documented on my Instagram if you want to see the behind-the-scenes of it all.

After many weeks later of crafting and designing, the completed assets were finally assembled and I finished my project. We were able to bring our projects to class and take pictures of them with a studio setup so we could have more professional-looking photos! You can check out my finished collection of designs below.