When we read books, we’re free to visualize the stories the way we want. Writers tell the stories and readers imagine the rest: how characters look, the scenery and much more. Different from a movie where we see a director’s viewpoint, the book allows our imagination to be part of the story.

To graphically show that, we used the chroma key effect, a resource from the movie universe, used to insert elements that can’t be captured by the camera while shooting. In our campaign, chroma key represents the readers’ imagination; after all, they’re the ones who see the story like it is.

Besides the chroma key, each piece includes a prop that represents a character from the story (Dracula’s cape, Hamlet’s skull, Frankenstein’s screws and Capitan Nemo’s driving dress). The name of the authors, the titles of the books and frames with key elements from each story are also present.

There was a concern in reproducing the environment in Chroma key in the studio. The models were photographed wearing green fabric with an endless background of the same color. We needed to guarantee that anyone who saw the bright green color would understand it represents the Chroma key.

The images of the characters with props in the green background are the result of a combination of photography + 3D + digital illustration.

The book titles and frames were designed by hand, following the symmetries and shapes that better represent the books. The frames bring key elements of the stories to make the piece graphically richer (but without exaggerating).

The typographies were later treated with paper texture to refer more to the universe of book pages.

The layouts obey an established hierarchy: the character is on first plan wearing the prop that best characterize it, then the lettering and the frames.

After the placement of the pieces, people started to consider Penguin Books’ great classics in their to-read list. These stories- that everybody knows, but not everybody has read - started to be more requested in the bookstores all around the country.

Besides that, there was an increase in the sales across the book line of the publishing house, proving that a great story is can change people’s reading habits and, unintentionally, lead readers to other great stories.