Mucha

May 2020

Movie Trailer

Project Overview

This is a Movie Trailer made for the legendary Czech painter and decorative artist Alfons Maria Mucha, because Mucha is one of my favorite artists. This stand-alone personal project aims to give viewers a glimpse of Mucha’s life through the videos of his classic art works and classic life stories. Using vintage colors and soothing music in the background, the video depicts Mucha making art in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. This work is also an assignment for the course of MOME729, which lasts for 3 weeks.

Survey

At the beginning of this project, I did a detailed search of Mucha’s personal experience and his representative works. Alfons Maria Mucha was a Czech painter, illustrator and graphic painter who lived in Paris during the Art Nouveau period and was known for her stylistic and decorative theatrical posters, especially those of Sarah Bernhardt. He produced illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels and designs that became one of the most famous images of the time.

In the second part of his career, at the age of 43, he returned to his native Bohemia-Moravia, Austria, to work on a series of twenty monumental paintings, called The Slavic Epic, depicting all the peoples of the Slavic historical world, which he interpainted between 1912 and 1926.

He presented the series to the Czech nation in 1928, on the 10th anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s independence. He regards it as his most important job. It’s now on display in Prague.

Concept

This Movie trailer establishes the warm colors and retro overall feeling of Mucha’s classic works, which are luxurious, complex and orderly. The choice of fonts, background music and the overall tone of the video were all based on Mucha’s work style. I used montage and multi-line narration to produce this Movie trailer. The slow rhythm and music made the audience feel the prosperity of European art in the 19th to 20th century.

I’ve used two main sections in this video. The first part is the exhibition of Mucha’s classic works. I hope the audience will take the initiative to inquire about the artworks in the video after watching them, so as to promote them. The second part is the exhibition of Mucha and the video of the creation process. In order to show the popularity of Mucha, the video is intermixed with a different style of expression to avoid boring the audience.

Moodboard

At the beginning, I wanted to choose C4D and other 3D modeling software to make this video. For example, modeling objects or abstract objects that are metaphors for people or things that appear in movies.

However, after searching Mucha’s works and style, I think 3D works can not reflect the simplicity and luxurious texture of Mucha’s works.

At the same time, I think this video is intended as the opening title of a documentary, not a science fiction or suspense film.

Therefore, the video needs to show Mucha’s works or images and scenes of that era in Europe, which are not suitable for 3D modeling. So I finally chose to make it in the form of documentary.

Typography

Because the video is the opening of a film or documentary, the name and title of the producer should appear in the video. About the choice of font and font color, my ideas have the following points: First, the text needs to have a retro and slightly more complex line feel. Typography can’t be modern. Second, words need to be secondary in the film, neither ignored nor the first target. Based on these requirements, I found this font as the basis for the text in my video. At the same time, I used a dark color text and a white text background in the video. And I made the text size smaller. I think the contrast of the colors and the small size of the text will match the points I made above.

Color Palette

As you can see, the colors in the video match the colors of most of Mucha’s artwork. In Mucha’s work, almost all colors are warm, with light yellow or brown as the dominant color. I adjusted the color of the video in such a way that the audience could not only appreciate Mucha from the specific content of the video, but also influence the viewing experience of the audience in ways that they did not notice. I wanted to immerse the audience unconsciously in Mucha’s world. At the same time, I also hope that people will like Mucha and his work after watching this video, because Mucha is one of my favorite artists.

Final Scenes