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.
Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. have released an online animated Terminator Salvation movie poster, which the studio is calling a motion poster. From the official synopsis for T4:
In the highly anticipated new installment of The Terminator film franchise, set in post-apocalyptic 2018, Christian Bale stars as John Connor, the man fated to lead the human resistance against Skynet and its army of Terminators. But the future Connor was raised to believe in is altered in part by the appearance of Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a stranger whose last memory is of being on death row. Connor must decide whether Marcus has been sent from the future, or rescued from the past. As Skynet prepares its final onslaught, Connor and Marcus both embark on an odyssey that takes them into the heart of Skynet’s operations, where they uncover the terrible secret behind the possible annihilation of mankind.
The animated Terminator poster features a bombed cityscape transforming into the ubiquitous T-800 style endoskeleton skull. The Flash animation (which is essentially a stand-alone version of the animation created for the official Terminator Salvation website) was also translated into print form as a Terminator Salvation teaser poster. The Terminator 4 ad campaign was created by the film advertising agency Art Machine.
Speaking of the battle for the future, this Flash animated Terminator poster represents another salvo in the turf war between new media and traditional print (aka dead tree media) advertising. It is not hard to figure out which side of the business is shrinking. In this case there actually is a Judgement Day in the future, and it does not look good for traditional printed newspapers and magazines. That bleak future for the publishing industry will also affect movie print advertising, since print ad buys used to represent a significant portion of film ad spending. The decline of print media means those outlets will become more dependent on advertising as their subscriptions continue to decline. But ask yourself, when was the last time you opened up a Thursday edition of your local newspaper to look up movie theater showtimes for that Friday? That entertainment section of the newspaper full of movie ads used to represent the highest exposure for a film campaign’s key art, but that is becoming a thing of the past. How long will movie studios pay more money to reach a shrinking audience?
Beyond print media advertising, the delivery of film key art will continue to evolve at your local cineplex. Movie theater lobbies are already being filled with digital signage delivering movie ads, digital content and other movie signage advertising. Even printed 3D movie posters are advancing beyond the traditional paper one-sheet displayed in an theatre lobby movie poster lightbox. It is not hard to imagine this animated Terminator Salvation poster appearing in a digital movie poster case at a theater near you.
XYZ RBG offers high resolution scanning services for film, television, video game, and other media companies. The company has worked on films in The Matrix series, Lord of the Rings, and King Kong. Through the company’s XYZ Imaging, it also offers holographic printing services. A hologram is defined as: “A three dimensional image; unlike regular images which are usually two dimensional, a three dimensional image, or hologram, appears to “pop out” of the media on which it is printed or illuminated from.”
The Ottawa Canada firm has created technology that allows eight seconds of video to be manufactured as a paper thin three dimensional hologram movie poster:
The film industry is the first target for what XYZ RGB bills as the next-generation movie poster. The company can place a short clip right in the poster, giving people a chance to view a scene without going into the theatre.
The technology is turning heads around the world. When he heard about it, Titanic director James Cameron couldn’t believe the 3-D posters were possible.
“He said to me, ‘if you have discovered imbedded video in plastic, you have discovered the holy grail of advertising,’” said Jan-Erik Nyhuus, vice-president of business development for XYZ RGB Inc.
The company demonstrated this printing technology by producing a custom made three dimensional Terminator 2 movie poster and presenting it to director Cameron. The claim is that this hologram movie poster is more advanced than past lenticular movie posters (such as the recent Spider-Man 3 lenticular poster).
Sony Pictures has released a three dimensional teaser movie poster for Spider-Man 3. The Spider-Man 3 lenticular movie poster features the chest torso of Peter Parker’s red Spider-man suit that morphs into the black and white “symbiote” costume (which will presumably end up as the basis for the villian Venom). The Spiderman lenticular poster 3D effect happens when the viewer changes angles when looking at the poster.
A 3D lenticular movie poster image is created by a convex prism lens over the surface of the printed poster, which shows different parts of an image depending on the perspective of the viewer. The process has been around since the 1900s, but has become more popular in recent years as a collectible item. Past movie poster lenticulars include Species 2, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
While lenticular movie posters tend to be popular with collectors and fans, film studios do not create lenticulars very often. This is due to several reasons: they are more expensive to produce, they require (for best results) being backlit in a movie theater lightbox frame, and most importantly, smaller poster details (such as text) are difficult to read.
One way to make a film feel epic and grand in scale in a piece of advertising art is the use of a “forced perspective” style logo. Why have a small understated film logo (known as a title treatment) when you can have it towering like a building over everything else? In essence, the logotype becomes part of the physical environment of the poster art. This type of perspective logo was especially popular in the 1950s, hence some people might refer to it as a “Ben-Hur” style logo. The logo as a 3D object has become popular again recently (see Lara Croft: Tomb Raider 2 and War of the Worlds), especially with the advent of 3D modeling programs as part of a movie poster designer’s software arsenal.
