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.
It’s the end of the year and that can only mean one thing: We give out another award to Lionsgate marketing and Art Machine film ad agency just like we did last year. This year-end poster recognition is also known as the 2nd Annual Posterwire.com Movie Poster of the Year Award.
There were a few notable pieces of film poster key art from 2006. The “cut-out” teaser campaign for the movie Brick was interesting. A star sell here and there. The continued glut of animated films (and their posters). The “What can we get away with?” gore of modern horror posters. There were plenty of movie poster controversies, both real and fake.
An obvious choice for movie poster of the year might be the series of one-sheets for the film V for Vendetta. We love that each poster embraced a slightly different style and variation of vintage “propaganda” poster art, but a slight criticism might be the ad campaign felt a bit unfocused and like an exercise that only graphic designers and “fan-boys” would really appreciate.
Our choice for the best one-sheet of 2006 is the Hard Candy movie poster.
Technically we are a year off — the film Hard Candy (now available on DVD) first premiered in January 2005 at the Sundance Film Festival, but it wasn’t released domestically until April 2006.
Created by Art Machine for film distributor Lionsgate, the Hard Candy one-sheet features an image of a young girl (with an obvious “Little Red Riding Hood” look) as “bait” in a very large and lethal looking bear-trap.
One reason we admire this piece of key art is that it met the challenge of selling the film’s difficult subject matter visually: How do you design a piece of key art to market a film about an apparent “sexual predator” and an “innocent” underage girl and the twists and turns of their encounter? That logline doesn’t exactly beg for a “Big Heads Floating in the Sky” star-sell movie poster. (Although the other Hard Candy movie poster might fit that bill.) This leads to why many feel that smaller independent films can have a distinct advantage when creating a marketing campaign: without the benefit (or burden?) of big stars and big budgets, these types of films have an opportunity of being more creative in their advertising out of sheer necessity. That’s not to say all smaller films automatically have superior movie poster designs or better marketing — any film ad campaign can buckle under the three Rs of the movie marketing design process: “Review. Revise. Reject.” And larger films do use a bit of conceptual imagery on occasion, especially in the realm of teaser posters.
We may look like a “flog” heaping so much praise on Art Machine and Lionsgate, but they have produced several great one-sheet designs in recent years and picked up a few awards along the way. (They have had their share of misfires as well.)
The Weinstein Company is running a movie poster design contest to create a Factory Girl movie poster. This poster is for the contest only, not to design the actual Factory Girl movie poster one-sheet used in theaters. Our opinion of “Design a Movie Poster” contests is well known, so we won’t rehash that again. Well, just one rehashed point: No major film studio has ever run a contest to design a movie poster where the winning entry was used as the domestic theatrical one-sheet for a film key art ad campaign. This contest is no different. However, since the film studios seem to be inching closer and closer to this idea, we predict it will happen eventually.
Update: Reader Hargon points at that the studio used the Resident Evil movie poster contest winner as it’s domestic one-sheet. We were under the impression that Resident Evil poster was a limited run promotional poster only — but Sony wiped the movie poster design contest details from their site years ago. Apologize for the error.
What is more interesting about the Factory Girl movie poster design contest is the promotional materials included in the “production kit” for the contest. The downloadable contest kit (ZIP) includes “15 different images from the film, 6 different Title Treatments, and the billing block”. It also offers a step-by-step guide (PDF) to how they “created” the film’s (pseudo silkscreen look) movie poster. This is offered as “inspiration” along with instructions on how to create a movie poster:
BEGIN TO BUILD YOUR MOVIE POSTER!
Open your photo program and begin with a 2×3 proportioned canvas (e.g. 6”x18”, 12”x18” or 24”x36”), at whatever dpi you choose. We recommend at least 72dpi at 24”x36”, or higher the smaller the canvas.In a separate window, open an image from the included selection, or scan or import your own images/drawings/sketches/renderings. Just remember, you cannot use any copyrighted artwork or images of trademarked materials or people/places without their permission.
Now the fun part! Crop, colorize, filter, distort, invert (or anything in-between) the image to make it just how you want it to look on the poster. Check out ‘Treatment Ideas’ for some cool ideas. Next, copy the image and paste it onto the ‘poster canvas’ you first created or save the image and use your program’s ‘import’ tool to bring it into the poster. Repeat this step with as many images as you choose, adding each to the canvas.
Add a tag line to the poster. Either write your own, or see the ‘Official Poster’ and use ours!
Add the film name (title treatment) to the poster. You can either choose from one of our included ones or make your own. Have as much fun as you want, but make sure people can read the name of the movie!
Lastly, add the ‘Billing Block’ file to the poster at the bottom. This makes it a legal poster (with the production people’s names and the company logos). Don’t forget to save the file as a .jpeg, .GIF or .BMP file.
If only it were that easy.
A more accurate simulation of the film poster design process might be to run a poster design contest where a winner is picked from all the entries, have that winner go through several rounds of revisions altering their design completely, with each round of changes handed down by different sets of executives at the studio, and then have Harvey Weinstein step in at the very last minute and pick a completely different contestant’s movie poster and declare that person the winner instead. Granted, this may read as an extremely glib scenario, but sadly, it is an accurate one. Snarky comments aside, the raw design materials offered by the contest could make for an interesting challenge to anyone who aspires to design movie posters.
The contest is an interesting contrast to the themes surrounding Andy Warhol and “The Factory” (which is a backdrop to the film’s story of 1960s “it girl” Edie Sedgwick) and how others produced Warhol’s pop art. Could the contest be seen as the modern equivalent of all those Warhol assistants reproducing all those Marilyn Monroe prints?
