I’m going to start by admitting that I’ve never seen Ratatouille. I acknowledge that the prompt clearly expressed that I complete my poster based on a film that I have seen, but I really wanted to do Ratatouille.
It all started with a concept:
This image was grabbed from a single still of the film. This was the only reference material I used for the entire poster. I held onto to the still as it would come in handy to accent the background of the poster.
I quickly realized that I needed to make this a little more suggestive of what I think happens in the film. He’s a rat that can cook. So, I made that clear:
Here, I’ve laid out the foundation—the subject. These are seeds necessary to let my garden grow, so to speak. With the fundamental pieces out of the way, I decided it needed some visual intrigue. It couldn’t just be Ratatouille on a white background, though it certainly is eye catching. So, I used the above still and grabbed the left most part to use as a background. Unfortunately, I forgot to document the stylizing of both images because I was wholly locked in, so we’re about to make a big jump in progress:
Here, Ratatouille is a different texture from the background. It makes him stand out, but I’m not a big fan of how discordant the entire package looks. Here, I used the neural filters and fiddled with them enough until I got some textures I liked. Compounding my issue here is that it is difficult to read the text over the background. Not ideal.
I then threw on a second neural filter over the entire flattened image to blend after fixing up the edges a little bit. This helped make the subject fit stylistically with the background. After that, I threw on a few layer masks to adjust brightness, saturation, and contrast to make the background a little less bright and to make our chef stand out.
You may also notice that I used a little bit of AI repair to fix up the background and get rid of that pesky beige bit that made our title a little difficult to read. I also added the slightest bit of grain texture to the text to give it some depth. I want to reiterate that I don’t really know what happens in this movie. I haven’t seen it, and making this poster hasn’t necessarily made me want to watch it.
This is the final product. Glory be to Ratatouille.
Part 2: Aesthetic preferences
I’m a first-gen Iraqi, so I think I had a pretty conflicted upbringing with regards to the culture I consumed. There was always this half-in half-out feeling that I don’t think I’ve ever quite been able to shake. At home, I’m Iraqi, outside, I’m American, to a degree, but neither of those classifications really seem to fit.
I consequently was exposed to a lot of varying culture and art as a result—for example, Arabic music with quarter tones can be a very difficult thing for Western ears to listen to, and on the inverse, my father would never sit down and listen to Stravinsky and think to himself, “what delight!” In high school, I planned on starting college as a music major, and focusing on ethnomusicology, because I found it rewarding to immerse myself in other cultures. Because of my experiences, I feel particularly nomadic, and find that my aesthetic language is really an amalgamation of anything and everything I’ve interacted with.
I also started developing my passion for film in high school—I eventually reached a point where I decided that I was going to be this big foreign film buff, that the regular western films were not good enough. I think there’s something about that relationship too, this feeling that Western aesthetics have been imposed upon me, and within me, a desire to fight back against those standards. It’s like Althusser’s claim about ideology, in that regardless of whether you support it or not, everything you do is almost always in dialogue with it. In my case, I think I am always having a back and forth between cultural liberation and Western impositions.