Oscars final designs - La La Land

I had a lot of difficulty getting this poster finished in a way I was happy. The themes in La La Land are those of falling in love and the naivety that comes with that feeling, and the necessity that sometimes relationships have to be sacrificed for people's lives to progress. The film also explores the brutality of the world of auditions and art critics, people bare themselves and everything they feel often just to be rejected and crushed. I found these ideas really hard to convey visually as they are quite complex, and I didn't want to just cop out and make an image of the characters dancing on a hill, as most of the existing promotional art for the film is based around imagery like that.

This idea was taken from studying the soundtrack to the film rather than the visuals, specifically the song "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)" by Emma Stone, which is performed towards the end of the film and expresses her characters intense ambition while melancholically realising she needs to leave her current life behind in order to move forward with her dream. It's a very emotional song and I took the feeling and thoughts that the lyrics gave me to finalise the designs for this poster. I chose to encapsulate the two figures in a small circle to represent the finite nature of their relationship - its crucially important to both of them but it isn't able to last with both of them going different ways.
I used the two outer rings coupled with the dark blue to reflect water, as water is a running metaphor in the song. The song begins with the Emma Stone's character describing a story of her aunt jumping into the River Seine in Paris. This story represents to her the bravery and idealism she uses to take the figurative leap into acting.
Another line later in the song speaks of water in a metaphorical sense, describing the necessity of creatives and the dreamers in order to change the world for the better: "Here's to the rebels, the ripples from pebbles, the painters and poets and plays.". The imagery in this line really leapt out to me as encapsulating the message of the whole theme of the film, which doesn't suggest dreams will always come true and work out regardless of what happens, but the necessity of realising the limitations of the world and still having the strength to keep going and work harder to make your dreams happen, rather than waiting for the world to sort itself out. The imagery in this line was what inspired me to reflect rippled water as the basis for the poster.