Challenge
Swap a movie's genre while still maintaining the integrity of the characters
Some early sketches of what I thought I might do.
One of my favorite movies ever is Studio Ghibli's Kiki's Delivery Service. It's a slice of life film that follows Kiki, a young witch, but I looked at the title recently and had a thought: That could easily be the title of a post-apocalyptic movie as well. Was that what Miyazaki intended? Probably not, but I did it anyway.
I started by looking up as many images as I could of the original box art for the 1989 film. I wanted the same pose that I remember so fondly of Kiki flying through the air, and I still wanted her to have her iconic colors, even if I was about to launch her into a much bleaker world. Having found plenty of reference images, I started sketching a small thumbnail to get the right pose and silhouette I was looking for before bringing it into Clip Studio Paint to start refining it.
Do you think she still delivers pastries?
I traded Kiki's black dress for a black jumpsuit, since that seemed a little more post-apocalypse appropriate, and added some Mad-Max style armor, damaging her broom a little and adding small details like bandages and patches where I thought worked nicely. I added a crack to her radio, then moved on to the background. I kept her cat Gigi more or less the same though, since he's always had a sort of shell-shocked look to him.
Once I was happy with the illustration, I moved it into Adobe InDesign to work on the title. I found a serif font that looked almost identical to the original title, but it felt too cheerful for what I had in mind, so I started searching through my library of font families to find the right match. I finally settled on the Foglihten serif font, as it still has that Kiki feel to it while being more serious than the font of the original movie was. I mocked it up in Adobe Photoshop, and called it good.
