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 STARZ television network is running highlights from The Hollywood Reporter 2006 Key Art Awards ceremony this month. Hosted by comedian Kevin Nealon, the 2006 Key Art Awards honor the best in film marketing, most notably film posters and movie trailers. This is a rare opportunity to see portions of the annual film marketing awards ceremony, as this is the first year the Key Art Awards have appeared on television. The special features highlights and interviews with the creators of this year’s award winning movie posters and film trailers. Check the STARZ movie channel schedule to tune into the film advertising awards special.
Virgins and illustrators ruled the world of movie poster key art as the winners of the Hollywood Reporter’s 35th annual Key Art Awards were announced in Hollywood on June 16th. Notable winners at this year’s ceremony in the movie poster categories include: The 40-Year-Old Virgin poster (which managed to overcome a premature hyphenation problem) as Best Comedy Poster and the Shepard Fairey illustrated Walk the Line poster as Best Teaser Poster. Illustration also drew in another win for the Lord of War poster as Best Action Adventure Poster.
Here are the 2006 Key Art movie poster winners:
COMEDY POSTER
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
ACTION ADVENTURE POSTER
Lord of War
INTERNATIONAL FILM POSTER
Batman Begins
To see the complete list of 2006 Key Art Award winners visit The Hollywood Reporter.
The Hollywood Reporter recently announced the nominees for The 35th Annual Key Art Awards. The nominees are in 29 categories covering movie posters, film trailers, online advertising, TV spots, outdoor advertising, theatrical standees, print ads, home entertainment and more. In case everyone is not familiar with the term key art (and why it is the name of an awards ceremony for film advertising), The Hollywood Reporter defines the term as “the singular, iconographic image that is the foundation upon which a movie’s marketing campaign is built.”
One-sheet movie poster highlights include nominations for the Saw II one-sheet (our pick for the 2005 Posterwire.com Movie Poster of the Year), Lord of War, and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. All three of these movie posters were created by the design studio Art Machine, which led this year’s Key Art Awards with the most nominations for an advertising agency.
The winners will be announced June 16 at the Key Art Awards ceremony, hosted by comedian Kevin Nealon at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
Here are the 2006 Key Art movie poster nominees:
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.
