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.
Readers and would-be Adobe Photoshop gurus over at the Something Awful forums recently pointed their weekly “Photoshop Phriday” remix thread at modern movies illustrated in a “Grindhouse cinema” movie poster style. In this case, Grindhouse being the popular label for the low budget film and exploitation movie poster style popular in the 60s and 70s.
It is always interesting to see modern movies re-interpreted through a different style of key art — this film poster remix for Little Miss Sunshine is a particularly good (and disturbing) example.
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?
FirstShowing.net is giving away two different versions of the new James Bond Casino Royale movie posters as part of their Poster Madness Contest Series of movie poster giveaways. Enter the contest by Saturday, November 25th for a chance to win a copy of the Casino Royale teaser poster or the Casino Royale final domestic one-sheet. (via IMPAwards.com)
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?
Sony Tri-Star is running a “Create a Silent Hill movie poster” contest:
Think you’re a fan of Silent Hill? Prove it. Design your own movie poster! Everything you need is right here — photos, titles, key guidelines, etc. The winning poster may be printed and may be distributed to theaters. So get those creative juices flowing, design and submit your poster by January 3, 2006. Then get all your friends to vote for your poster starting January 4, 2006 because the winning artist gets $2,500 cash, 25 passes to see the movie, and more.
We are not fans of “design our movie poster” contests run by film studios — at least the kind that dangle the idea the winning design will be used as the film’s official one-sheet.
There are many reasons for our reservations, but one that comes to mind is this type of “contest” doesn’t do anything to help the “Photoshop crap” criticism that is commonly directed at modern Hollywood one-sheets. This type of competition plays into the “Anyone can design!” stereotype that infuriates so many art directors and designers in all corners of commercial art. (See the always enjoyable Clientcopia for examples of this frustration.)
To our knowledge, no film studio to date has released a “contest poster” design as a domestic one-sheet in theatres. There have been movie poster contests in the past, most notably for the Resident Evil series (also released by Sony). Perhaps this contest will result in the first fan poster to reach your local theatre lobby. (Fingers crossed!)
The practice of leaving key art marketing decisions in the hands of the “audience” is nothing new. (Many Hollywood film one-sheets are run through public focus groups, just like the films themselves.) But the idea of one-sheet contests may have first started back in 1995, when Fine Line Features ran a “Pick Our Poster” web contest for their film The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. The studio posted two final poster designs (created by the ad agency working on the film) on the film’s official website, and invited viewers to vote on their favorite design. The winning design was set to be printed and released to theatres as the film’s one-sheet. The voting came and went, and a winning design was chosen… Until, at the last minute, the studio completely changed their mind, ignored the contest results, and printed a new third design that combined elements of the two contest posters, having nothing to do with the contest itself. Ironically, that poster contest result gave the public a real taste of the three Rs (“Review. Revise. Reject.”) in the film advertising key art poster design process that so many one-sheets go through.
The Sony film advertising execs seem to have learned from this type of mistake, as the Sony / Tri-Star Silent Hill poster web site clearly states: “The winning poster may be printed and may be distributed to theaters.” (Emphasis ours.) The contest does offer just a bit of interesting insight into some things considered when creating a movie poster, including guidelines imposed by the MPAA for key art:
Studio Guidelines
In order to become an official movie poster suitable for all audiences the poster must follow the guidelines listed below:
1. No nudity or sexual activity
2. No gun to camera/no shooting to camera
3. No gun to victim/no shooting to victim
4. No more than 2 guns may appear
5. No reference to drugs/drug paraphernalia
6. No offensive language or gestures
7. No blood
8. No violence towards women
9. No cruelty to animals
10. No mutations/mutilations/cadavers
11. No excessive violence or brutality
12. No rape/molestations
13. No people on fire
14. No people in explosion/people blown out of explosion
15. No exploiting/capitalizing on rating (i.e., “R has never gone this far”, “Banned in Boston”)
16. No demeaning of religion, race or national origin
So all those designers and “Photoshop gurus” out there who have dreamed of designing movie posters, Sony is giving you your chance… maybe.
If there is one thing that “Photoshop geeks” love to do, it is to rework images — “remixing” them — to create a new (and sometimes humorous) result. These often get submitted to sites soliciting “Photoshop contests” and other image posting mayhem. Popular sites like Fark.com, SomethingAwful.com, and b3ta.com all garner submissions of these type of image “smashups”. One of the most popular Photoshop sites with this type of user-submitted photo remixing: Worth1000.com.
As you might guess, the number one source for Photoshop remixing, both as a subject matter and visual source material, is movie posters. In Worth1000.com’s “Mate a Movie” Photoshop contest, users create movie poster image submissions that are of “two or more movies, combined to make one much funnier movie.” Looking through the most recent contest’s entries, there are some pretty funny posters, ranging from movies like Freaky Friday the 13th to Poohlander. (via JoBlo.com)
