This was a class project for Advanced Graphic Design (DES 525) at San Francisco State University under the instruction of Deborah Glass. 

The prompt was to design a poster modeled after an existing promotional movie poster using plagiarism, parody or pastiche as a strategy
for copying and re-presenting the original.

Inspiration:

I wanted to draw inspiration from some of my favorites, being Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. This was also during the month of October, so I was already in the horror/thriller mood! 

I had also just re-watched Mommie Dearest and felt the urge to tell everybody about it.

Ideation:

Although I knew I was excited for my initial idea, I knew I had to do more visual research and ideating, which took me to some of my other favorites. That includes Grey Gardens (both documentary and movie), Forrest Gump, and A League of Their Own. 

Iteration:

Since I had a good idea of the direction I wanted to go, literally parodying the Psycho poster with screen grabs of Mommie Dearest and changing the title, I was able to play with the idea of a wire hanger breaking up these fragments of what seems to be broken glass. By using the wire hanger, it leans more into the Mommie Dearest reference and the sheer camp of it all. 

It's almost hard to notice at first, since it makes up the foreground in a way that closely mimics the original Psycho poster, but once realized, it's humorous how large and obvious it is. Additionally, it speaks to the way the wire hanger remained in the back of Tina's memory all those years later when she wrote Mommie Dearest. The wire hanger was used as a weapon by Joan at her breaking point against a young innocent Tina, and would be the very weapon used by Tina to then shatter her mothers image. And it worked, because now Joan Crawford is spoken in the same breath as Psycho. 

Final outcome:

The final iteration which I submitted for a grade is this, mocked up to ease your imagination. My favorite detail to note for this particular version is the consistent line or sight, or gaze across the composition. Our eyes tend to look where we see others looking, and its something I wanted to experiment with here.

It starts at the top, where a deranged Joan is staring at grown-up Tina, where she looks back at her mother and her psychotic episode with the axe, which is positioned to look like she is aiming for her own neck just below, to finish the narrative. The last image is meant to depict the Joan Crawford everybody loves and adorns, being destroyed by her unmotherly behavior behind closed doors.