Neo
Everyone knows what Matrix code looks like. That was the problem. Two constraints. The pack had to carry the film’s nature rather than lean on the title, and the licensor supplied very little to work. So the pack had to be built from the property’s own language rather than assembled from supplied assets. I built Neo’s head out of code as the key visual, so a single image does the work instead of only the title. The sleeve is clear plastic just like the screen you read the code through. Moreover, the idea for the packaging was the code rain, but moving — running as the box is pulled out, not printed as a still.
The key is that plastic sleeve over the box. White ink backs the sleeve, then process colour prints over it, so the artwork holds true against whatever passes beneath instead of dropping out on the film. The box carries its own code. Pull the two apart and the printed layers slide across each other. The standard way to get that interference is a barrier of solid black bars at even intervals, hiding and revealing the layer beneath as the sheets pass. It works, and it puts a bank of hard mechanical lines across the artwork. On a Matrix box, a ruled grid is the wrong kind of pattern. So the barrier became the code itself. The masking sits in the negative space between characters — gaps a column of falling code already has. The interference is identical; nothing on the pack is foreign to the story. The mechanism disappeared into the subject.
Neo
Category
Graphic Design, Packaging
