With a rollout campaign in mind and many different applications across a variety of media the first order of business was creating a bold title.

Creating a title for a show is never the same process twice but always begins by understanding the tone and character of the show and what world of visual references the film lives in. In this case it was pretty clear in which generally microcosm of films this would exist. It’s ARNOLD and it needed to feel like an Arnold movie. Bold, muscular, heroic. Perhaps just a dash of superhero.

Schwarzenegger is an action star. In fact, maybe the quintessential action star and so the title needed to feel a part of this legacy. A respectful, loving homage to the action titles we know and love. We explored letterforms and compositions that feel at once familiar but not specific to any one film and something that could feel a little timeless but totally appropriate for a modern action film.

For our first round of exploration we always cast a wide net and approach the process as a discussion with our clients about aspects of the explorations that resonate. Occasionally the perfect title might appear in this round, but usually it’s about finding ideas that work from within multiple explorations.

In order to define visual lanes for exploration and to create a vocabulary for discussing directions we broke the genres down into several categories: Action Blockbuster, Secret Agent, Modern Hollywood Franchise. While there was quite a bit of structural overlap between these groupings they each contained unique attributes and details which pulled the work apart and helped ensure that each exploration contained some distinct and recognizable differences.

In this case there was an approach from the Action Blockbuster category which had a lot to love about it and felt really appropriate to the project. With this in hand we moved forward into making the letterforms feel dimensional and exploring the materials. 

What the title was made out of was just as important as the letterforms themselves. Not only do the materials contribute to the character of the title but they can also dictate how it will read in different contexts. The added challenge here was knowing that the title elements would probably inform the CG teaser trailer as well.

Industrial materials seemed like the right direction to head and we explored things like metal, carbon fiber, kevlar; dirty, clean, broken, polished, scratched, scuffed, exploded. There was a lot that could work, but after a bit of iteration we landed on a somewhat subtle combination of mildly distressed chrome filled with something like a red carbon fiber weave that is evocative of the red Stat Farm t-shirt material.