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.
Worth1000.com posted their latest movie poster theme Photoshop contest, known as One Letter Off. Billed as “Not quite the movies you know”, the contest rules are fairly simple, but set the stage for some really creative results:
It’s not easy being a professional graphic designer. Often they’re asked to create a movie poster with nothing more to go on than the title. And if the email has a typo in it, things get even more confusing. All it takes is one wrong letter to really foul things up. You should have seen the posters they first designed for “Snakes on a Plate”, “A Fight at the Opera”, and “Mobster House”! (We won’t discuss the original poster for “Tucker”… )
The rules of this contest are thus: take a popular movie and swap one and only one letter of its title OR add or subtract one and only one letter of its title. (Change multiple letters, or add or subtract multiple letters, or add/subtract a letter and change another as well and your entry will be disqualified.) Then design the poster for the new movie that results.
The “One Letter Off” movie poster contest is not a new idea (this is the fourth in the Worth1000.com series), or even limited to one web site, as readers of the Something Awful forums will tell you.
Just in time for the holidays we managed to get our hands on the new coffee table book Art of the Modern Movie Poster: International Postwar Style and Design. This movie poster design book certainly has to be one of the largest (and one of only a few) books on movie poster design as an art form. Weighing 8 pounds with over 500 pages, the book features 1500 movie poster images from 30 countries over the last 60 years. Also featured are profiles of movie poster artists, including legendary illustrators Saul Bass and Bob Peak.
From the book publisher Chronicle Books:
Art of the Modern Movie Poster — Critically authoritative, visually stunning, and physically massive, Art of the Modern Movie Poster is the first and last word on post-WWII film poster design. Showcasing fascinating examples from 15 nations, this collection of more than 1,500 exemplary designs is a must-have for film buffs, design and poster aficionados alike. The posters are organized by country of origin, offering an intriguing glimpse into each region’s unique visual sensibility and sometimes unexpected takes on familiar films. Gathered from the renowned collection of the Posteritati Gallery in New York—one of the largest holdings of international film posters in the world—this volume is the definitive survey of both film and popular graphic art in the modern era.
The book was created by designers Judith Salavetz and Spencer Drate, writer Dave Kehr, with images from the movie poster collection of Sam Sarowitz and his Posteritati Gallery in New York. The group previously collaborated on The Independent Movie Poster Book.
The official Chronicle Books blog features a post by designer Suzanne LaGasa about various cover design concepts for the Art of the Modern Movie Poster. You can see their exploration of book jacket designs before they finally settled on a “patchwork grid” cover design.
A gallery show for the book’s release is currently on display at the Lincoln Center’s Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery in New York City through January 4th, 2009.
One of our favorite weblogs, Speak Up, has an article analyzing The Color of Top Grossing Movies in movie posters. They did this by pulling a color scheme of movie posters representing the top 5 grossing movies in each MPAA rating category. This came about because author Armin Vit wondered if NC-17 rated film posters would be “dark and provocative” as a visual baseline.
Speak Up’s experiment highlights a few basics in one-sheet color schemes: Comedies feature brighter colors (and rely heavily on white backgrounds), whereas other film genres skew darker (and more likely to use a black background). You could further categorize film types by color: Science fiction films tend to use cool tones (blues, greens). Action films use warm tones (reds, yellows). Horror films use earth tones (oranges, browns). Animated films use the most varied color combinations, reflecting the colors of the animation itself. Of course, there are countless exceptions to these genre by color examples.
Smokin’ Aces director Joe Carnahan’s official site features a weblog written by the film’s creator about the upcoming film. For the past few months, Carnahan has been posting Smokin’ Aces poster designs that didn’t make the cut. It’s a rare opportunity to see all the unproduced movie posters that never make it to your local movie theatre lobby. As most film advertising art directors and designers will tell you, sometimes their best poster design work never sees the light of day beyond their own portfolios.
Carnahan has posted several rejected (or “killed”) movie poster concepts, along with his own commentary about each one sheet design, including info about why particular designs were not chosen to be the official Smokin Aces movie poster. Our favorite example is his blog entry about the “Franz Ferdinand poster” design:
Here’s another one guys. This one almost became the one-sheet. The problem for me was, I couldn’t get the similarity to the Franz Ferdinand Album cover out of my head! Is it just me? I like the images, even though they seem a bit crowded/jammed together.
The director has also been using his film weblog to run his very own movie poster contest, inviting his blog readers to submit their own Smokin’ Aces movie poster designs.
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?
Looking through the new book The Independent Movie Poster Book, which we discussed previously, we came across one of our favorite posters for the 1991 independent film My Own Private Idaho.
Directed by Gus Van Sant, the unusual film stars River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as two male hustlers in Portland, Oregon. In a way, the film’s poster offers a snapshot of the “golden age of indies” — the independent films of the 1990s. With it’s torn and blurry photographs of the two stars, the poster’s imagery represented something outside the Hollywood mainstream. (And when is the last time you saw someone being depicted smoking a cigarette on a mainstream Hollywood film one-sheet?)
For movie poster art director Rigel Morrison, the film My Own Private Idaho represented a chance to create a piece of memorable key art: “It was nice working on such a hip movie at that time”, says designer Morrison. A movie poster art director for over 15 years, Morrison continues film ad design work, most recently on key art for the upcoming Aeon Flux.
“For the design of the My Own Private Idaho poster, we were just trying to think outside the box. What started out as a lark for coming up with ideas became sort of an improvisational moment — I took unit photography of the actors and actually ripped them into pieces. This was back in 1991, and I was doing it all by hand, before everything was done in Photoshop as they are now. It seems like a common thing now [ripped edges], but back then it worked well for the film’s look.”
That particular movie poster design must have also pleased Fineline, as it only took the film studio a few months (quick by film marketing standards) to take Morrison’s first round movie poster concept to a final approved My Own Private Idaho one-sheet. “I’m happy with how the poster turned out. It’s gotten some nice feedback over the years.”
The best thing and the worst thing to happen to movie poster design (and probably commercial art in general) is Adobe Photoshop. Then again, whenever a creative enterprise is changed by technology, you’ll have an equal number of people singing the virtues of new “tools” versus those crying about the death of “art”.
Today, all movie posters are designed and finished using Adobe Photoshop software — especially in the area of retouching and photo illustration. As recent as the 1990s, this wasn’t always the case. Before the advent of cheap color printers, affordable high-end scanners, and a Apple Macintosh G5 on every desk (even for the receptionist) at an ad agency, high end photo illustration and retouching was an expensive enterprise. For film ad agencies working on movie poster one-sheets, this meant employing outside finishing houses (media agencies that specialized in digital retouching and output) to handle the large image files and finishing work involved in creating print ready artwork. Photo illustration meant expensive service bureau Iris prints that you weren’t allowed to touch (for fear of smudging), high end $500,000 Quantel Paintbox workstations created expressly to push around large graphics, and professional retouchers costing $500 a hour to use.
But those days are coming to an end. With the growing use of Photoshop, many design agencies have taken retouching/finishing in-house, rather than employing an outside finisher. (Some retouchers work on their own, much like a freelance designer, rather then being part of a larger company.) Adobe Photoshop has made the retouching process easier and less expensive — just about anyone can do it. Unfortunately with this availability, comes the temptation for misuse and overuse.
We have covered various movie poster illustrators in the past, but the modern movie poster is a graphic designer’s medium. And when discussing movie poster design, the subject begins with legendary graphic designer Saul Bass.
Saul Bass brought a designer’s sense of iconography and purpose to film posters, and more importantly, to film-making in general. The man who created the AT&T logo designed only a few film posters in his early career, but his designs were enough to change the direction of film key art. When looking at his poster designs for films like Anatomy of a Murder, Vertigo, and Exodus, one can see how Bass was able to encapsulate a film’s narrative direction in a visual identity through graphic design.
His early success in film poster key art led Saul Bass to his most famous contribution to motion pictures: designing opening title sequences. Until that time, a film’s opening credits were likely to be a mundane listing of personnel involved with making the film. Bass changed all that when he established film title design as an art form, especially in his famous collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock.
The influence of the groundbreaking design work of Saul Bass continues today, whether it’s the playful opening titles in the recent film Catch Me If You Can or the controversial “homage” in the one-sheet for the Spike Lee film Clockers.
