Mario Movie Guerilla Marketing Project
Overview
I was tasked with choosing a movie and making a three month long guerilla marketing / advertising campaign for it.
As I had recently watched the new Super Mario Bros Movie, I decided to choose that for my topic as it is out of the way of my normal design style.
The first image in the set of three is the dumpster which shows Mario entering the mushroom kingdom from our POV. clued in by his shoe in the first pipe. Having the name "Super Mario Brother's Plumbing" doesn't actually reveal anything about the plot of the movie, as in the original 1993 film, they are called the same thing. This name is used canonically across the Mario universe as Mario and Luigi's Plumbing company name.
The second image is a little more revealing of the plot showing that at some point Mario and Luigi come back to our world. Evident by the chain dangling out of the pipe and their tag underneath. There is a small call to action here to signify the viewer that there is something BIG coming.
The third composition is a busy street corner with multiple different height of warp pipes coming out of the ground. This is the Grand Reveal. Bowser's hand is coming out of the main tube and trying to grab the Power Star only to instead grab Mario's name and crush it. This is a symbol for the ending of the movie, When bowser eventually attacks the real world.
This project was really fun to do and tested my creativity.
Approach
For this assignment, we had the choice of doing print or physical structures. I decided to go the route of a physical structure as I have been learning blender independently on the side.
I wanted to keep the plot of the movie a secret and cryptic as everyone in the world and their grandmother already knows the iconic things in the Mario franchise.
Creating the green warp pipes and other elements in blender was a new experience and very fun to play around with, it gave me a lot of ideas for future design use.
After I had created all the elements in blender, I went on a search for some good areas that I could image the pipes actually being in real life. This lead me to take pictures of a dumpster, a wall, and a busy four-way stop.
Jol.Design 2025
Edmonton, Canada