Final Syntesis Design Studio
Professor: Marco Pea
Politecnico di Milano
Academic Year: 2013/2014
BRIEF
To design a printed trailer based on a Beat Generation’s movie
Howl is a 2010 American movie written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. It talks about the life
of the great beat poet Allen Ginsberg (performed by James Franco), moving around the 1955 debut of his poem Howl
(the manifesto of the Beat Generation) at the Six Gallery in San Francisco and the consequent 1957 obscenity trial.
The film is characterised by an experimental slant, using both black- and- white, colors and animation techniques.
RESPONSE
The brochure, a succession of emotional and informative contents, opens with the first lines of the poem.
Some pages host simply black-and white film scenes, whereas others inform the reader about the plot, the cast,
reviews and so on.
I respected the experimental style of the film, using black-and-white and color photography at the same time.
The Rockwell character was used to express effectively the idea of a "shouted head-line", communicating all
the power of Ginsberg's prose. Captions and quotations are composed with Courier New Regular,a typical typewriter character, to rembember the use of the typewriter among the Beat Generation poets. Yellow colour, which characterises the informative pages, is a clear reference to the trial atmosphere.
