Posterwire.com is a movie poster weblog. From images of the latest Hollywood one-sheets to vintage movie posters, this film poster weblog hopes to offer a bit of insight into film key art.
The majority of movie poster artwork is created using elements from two sources: unit photography and special shoots. (And the third source would be various incarnations of stock photography, often combined with the first two sources.) We’ve covered the topic of special shoots before — photography shot especially for advertising and promotional campaigns.
Sometimes key art photo shoots can involve complete sets and props, often re-using the film’s actual sets for the special shoot. In some cases, the studio advertising department goes to the expense and trouble of creating sets exclusively for a film poster photo shoot. For the Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction movie poster, the sequel’s star Sharon Stone is depicted in a (somewhat visually “busy”) scene sitting on a bedroom chair, surrounded by various elements of danger and mayhem: cracked mirrors, a mysterious hand, her signature crossed legs, etc. Looking at some of the Basic Instinct 2 photography, we’re going to assume this was taken on the film set. What’s interesting is we can see the original photograph that became the basis of the Basic Instinct 2 one-sheet, and how that original image was changed to reach the final key art. (The French teaser poster offers a stripped down version of the same photograph as it’s poster image.)
This is essentially how some movie poster concepts begin — the entire design process might be set in motion by a film advertising art director being handed a CD full of special shoot and unit photography image files and asked to begin design work using those raw images. Ideally, the movie poster design process begins with a proper conceptual stage, starting with sketch concepts and research — but that isn’t always the case. One scenario that prevents a singular concept/design/execution process involves one ad agency beginning work on the ad campaign, only to lose the job months later to a different ad agency that starts work much later in the film campaign design process.
Tartan Films is running a contest on MySpace (the uber social networking web site) to choose the one-sheet for the U.S. domestic release of the Korean film Lady Vengeance (originally titled Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). MySpace users can cast their vote for their favorite Vengeance poster (among a listing of 7 proposed one-sheets) by leaving a comment on the contest page.
In our opinion, the best Lady Vengeance poster would have to be the original foreign Sympathy for Lady Vengeance teaser poster, which isn’t up for contention in the online MySpace “Movie Poster Thunderdome”.
We won’t rehash our feelings about movie poster contests, but we do believe you’ll be seeing more of this “online focus group for film advertising” trend in the future. After all, why should the studios recruit teenagers and out-of-work actors found during a weekday visit to the Media City Center mall in Burbank California to fill out comment cards/surveys on movie poster concepts when they can do it online so much more efficiently?
The New York Times has an interesting article about one of the teaser posters for the new horror film Hostel using a daguerreotype. (You might be asking, what the hell is a daguerreotype?)
A daguerreotype is a photograph created through an “early photographic process with the image made on a light-sensitive silver-coated metallic plate.” (This early photographic process was common in the 1800s.)
For the Hostel teaser poster, Lionsgate executive VP of marketing Tim Palen was looking for a different type of image to market the gory film:
Palen figured that a poster with mangled bodies wouldn’t do the trick. So he dropped by the airy, tastefully decorated Manhattan studio of the Australian photographer Mark Kessell… But it was Kessell’s “Florilegium” (or “collection of floral images”) daguerreotypes that caught Palen’s eye. Each image is a close-up of a surgical instrument, so poetically rendered that it seems almost organic. Some of the macabre implements resemble exotic flowers.
“We were sort of blocked, and all the pieces fell into place once I saw that image,” Palen said. A deal was made to use that daguerreotype, which actually shows a surgical clamp. It now appears in theaters and on widespread promotions.
The rest of the NY Times article follows the vein that fine art may be the answer to the Big Heads Floating in the Sky movie poster cliche. Considering that most smaller films don’t follow that star-sell formula (horror movies usually don’t have stars to market with “big heads” in the first place), the idea of using a conceptual image or piece of “fine art” in a movie poster isn’t really a revelation. (Thanks to Jay for the original link.)
Dimension Films has just announced the studio will be producing a remake of the 1978 film Piranha. The original Roger Corman B-movie was directed by Joe Dante (and written by John Sayles), and features flesh-eating piranha fish being released into a summer resort’s rivers. On the surface, Piranha is nothing more than a Jaws rip-off. (Although, the tongue-in-cheek horror film does have its fans — including Steven Spielberg. The film even generated a sequel directed by a young James Cameron.)
The Piranha poster also follows the Jaws poster formula: swimming beauty on the water, in danger from said creature (with large teeth) from below. The Piranha poster illustration does invoke the right look — another example of how exploitation poster artwork was the great equalizer when compared to the advertising of big budget counterparts. After all, hiring a good illustrator wasn’t beyond the expense of lower budget films.
The illustrator giving the Piranha key art it’s teeth was artist John Solie. No stranger to exploitation film posters, Solie illustrated posters for some interesting 1970s films, including Candy Stripe Nurses, Shaft’s Big Score, and Soylent Green. Solie, speaking about his time working for Roger Coreman’s New World Pictures:
If they gave me as much of a free hand as possible to do the work, I didn’t care whether I was working for a B-movie company or a major. At New World, I’d go to lunch with the art director, he’d tell me the story of the movie, I’d make a drawing on a napkin, he’d approve it and I’d go home and do it. I never saw any of the movies, but I made the movie ads and they made a lot of money!
The annual 2006 Weblog Awards (the “Bloggies”) have opened up for blog nominations by the public. Since every other weblog likes to mention this fact, we thought we’d beg for vote nominations too. ;) So if you’ve enjoyed all the pithy commentary about gay cowboys, mentions of “Big Heads Floating the Sky”, high resolution movie poster images, and other film ad industry information, we’d certainly appreciate nominations for Posterwire.com in any of the Weblog Awards categories. (We’d probably be most appropriate in the Best Topical Weblog and Best New Weblog categories.) Regardless of how you feel about our vote whoring, stop by the awards site to vote for your favorite weblogs in a wide range of categories.
Here is a great Flickr photoset of foreign movie posters from the films of iconoclast director Luis Buñuel. (Thanks Ray.)
