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.
The Hollywood gossip blog Defamer.com points out that the new Just My Luck movie poster showcases Lindsay Lohan winking at the camera, which signals the message that Lohan will be showing you a fantastically good time in said movie. In fact, Lohan seems to be sending out this signal with a wink of her eye quite a bit. It remains to be seen as to whether Lindsay can trademark “The Wink” as a movie poster marketing look (see the Herbie: Fully Loaded poster and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen poster). What’s interesting about the Just My Luck poster is that she has a paparazzi photographer to thank for her one-sheet movie poster image:
Lindsay Lohan may have had problems with the paparazzi, but that doesn’t mean she won’t use their help in promoting her new movie. I’m told that the photo of the 19-year-old starlet on the poster for ‘Just My Luck’ is actually a paparazzi shot from more than a year ago. Lohan sat for an official photo shoot for the poster — she even wore a red wig for it because she had gone blonde by then — but a source tells me the images were rejected because “they were too high style.” The studio asked for another shoot, but someone suggested a paparazzi shot of a winking Lohan. Not only did everyone apparently agree that the pic captured the movie best, but it even inspired the film’s tag line: “Everything changed in the wink of an eye.”
The paparazzi photo of Lindsay Lohan used in the Just My Luck movie poster was taken over a year ago on Madison Avenue by New York Post photographer Larry Schwartzwald. As always, he wasn’t the only celebrity photographer there to capture Lohan out shopping. Since paparazzi photos (and most any other type of news photographs or “photocalls”) are available for sale and licensing by publications and other outlets, it’s not unheard for a film studio to use this type of third party photography of actors. Although, this type of candid photography tends to be an image source of last resort.
Each year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences releases an official Academy Awards poster to promote and commemorate the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony — the Oscars. In past years, the job of designing the “Oscar poster” has included an interesting spectrum of designers — from comic book illustrator Alex Ross to legendary graphic designer Saul Bass (and maybe a lesser known designer or two).
For the first time, the 78th Annual Academy Awards poster will come as a pair of designs based on vintage photographs. Entitled “Black Tuxedo” and “White Gloves”, the two official posters were designed by Joan Maloney of the San Diego design firm Studio 318. Each shows a cropped archival photograph of an actor holding the gold Oscar “moments after receiving the award”.
“We loved Joan’s idea of cropping the archival photographs down to just the torsos of the two performers, with their hands cradling their statuettes,” said Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis. “It transformed them from pictures of particular individuals at specific historic moments to images that convey the experience of capturing a dream.”
For some reason, the Academy has chosen not to say which two actors are seen in the “headless” photographs. (In case you were wondering, the poster images are of Cary Grant clenching his 1969 honorary Oscar and Julie Andrews with her 1964 “Mary Poppins” best-actress Oscar. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.)
Speaking of Cary Grant and secrets, is it just us or does the male “Black Tuxedo” poster look just a bit phallic? Maybe we are seeing things with so much talk about Brokeback Mountain and the Oscars lately.
The majority of movie poster artwork is created using elements from two sources: unit photography and special shoots. (And the third source would be various incarnations of stock photography, often combined with the first two sources.) We’ve covered the topic of special shoots before — photography shot especially for advertising and promotional campaigns.
Sometimes key art photo shoots can involve complete sets and props, often re-using the film’s actual sets for the special shoot. In some cases, the studio advertising department goes to the expense and trouble of creating sets exclusively for a film poster photo shoot. For the Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction movie poster, the sequel’s star Sharon Stone is depicted in a (somewhat visually “busy”) scene sitting on a bedroom chair, surrounded by various elements of danger and mayhem: cracked mirrors, a mysterious hand, her signature crossed legs, etc. Looking at some of the Basic Instinct 2 photography, we’re going to assume this was taken on the film set. What’s interesting is we can see the original photograph that became the basis of the Basic Instinct 2 one-sheet, and how that original image was changed to reach the final key art. (The French teaser poster offers a stripped down version of the same photograph as it’s poster image.)
This is essentially how some movie poster concepts begin — the entire design process might be set in motion by a film advertising art director being handed a CD full of special shoot and unit photography image files and asked to begin design work using those raw images. Ideally, the movie poster design process begins with a proper conceptual stage, starting with sketch concepts and research — but that isn’t always the case. One scenario that prevents a singular concept/design/execution process involves one ad agency beginning work on the ad campaign, only to lose the job months later to a different ad agency that starts work much later in the film campaign design process.
20th Century Fox has released three character teaser posters for the film Walk the Line. The bio-pic features Joaquin Phoenix as legendary musician Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. The three Walk the Line teaser posters make for an interesting (and somewhat different in tone) follow-up to the “woodcut” style illustration by Shepard Fairey for the first Walk the Line teaser poster. While these three new posters may invoke a “captured moment” effect via the grainy black and white treatment, they are definitely more conventional than the previous illustrated teaser.
On a somewhat unrelated note, these three Walk the Line teaser posters remind us of one of our favorite film studio executive client quotes about movie poster design:
“You can’t design a [movie] poster that’s black and white — people will think the movie is also in black and white.” – Film Advertising Executive
Yes, that makes perfect sense. [cough] (For the record, there are several black and white and otherwise monochromatic one-sheets released from time to time, despite that particular executive’s color blindness.)
Steve Carell is The 40-Year-Old Virgin. As the title suggests… Well, the title pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the film’s plot. More importantly, let’s discuss the funny portrait photograph used in the The 40-Year-Old Virgin movie poster.
Reader Martin S. writes:
Maybe you can explain why the poster linked above feels so different from other posters, it’s like so vacant, with a sort of Devo-ish image. I don’t know, I think it’s incredibly attention-getting.
The look and effectiveness of The 40-Year-Old Virgin poster can be summed up in one simple phrase:
Perhaps you remember it from your childhood. Maybe it was offered at your local mall. Regardless of when/where/how, the trappings of the cheesey family portrait remain the same: the innocuous muslin backgrounds, posing on the little round swivel chair, the photo subject looking away to the left (or right) of camera, and of course, the forced smile. As with all things schmultzy, it’s only a matter of time until the “Sears Portrait Studio” look is re-appropriated.
The “ironic” family portrait photograph became popular among rock and alternative bands, a famous example being when the Red Hot Chili Peppers visited their local portrait studio for band photos. But the trend wasn’t limited to music: the creators of South Park (Matt Stone and Trey Parker) have also made a portrait studio visit.
For The 40-Year-Old Virgin poster, posing the subject via “Stepford”-ized portrait photography, the goofy expression, not to mention the photo’s slightly skewed bright color palette, gives actor Steve Carell just enough punch to make this a really memorable image — which is saying a lot for a movie poster that relies on a simple image of the film’s star. (The “Better Late Than Never.” tagline helps too.)
Movie posters are often designed using photography shot especially for the film’s one-sheet campaign and other film advertising key art. These photo shoot set-ups are known as special shoots. The shoots usually involve photographing the actor(s) to be featured from the film in various poses and situations conceived by film ad agencies working on the ad campaign. Sometimes special shoots are acquired by the unit photographer working with actors on the set during a film’s production. But more often than not the special shoots are executed by a photographer shooting the actors against neutral backgrounds during a film’s post production.
For example, while Uma Thurman was trying to KILL BILL, she offered two films worth of character poses when being photographed for the film’s key art campaign. While most of her looks came straight from the film, there were a few concepts that never actually appeared in the Tarantino series. (We don’t remember the scene where Thurman’s character “The Bride” wields her Hanzo sword while wearing her wedding dress, but it still looks good for a photo shoot.)
In 1992, famed Czech photographer Tono Stano (NSFW) produced an arresting black and white photograph entitled “Sense”. Stano is famous for posing models into suggestive shapes and symbols in his photography. Two years later, Stano’s “Sense” photograph was used in the book cover design for the photography book The Body: Photographs of the Human Form by William A. Ewing. The Stano “Sense” image was cropped slightly on the top for the Ewing book cover design, which made the photograph an even more abstract and effective visual shape.
MGM’s marketing department liked the image too, so they utilized the very same concept for the one-sheet for the infamous 1995 Paul Verhoven film Showgirls. To be clear, MGM acquired licensing to use Tony Stano’s image for it’s Showgirls key art campaign, but it makes one wonder if the licensing became an afterthought of the poster’s release. A home video release of the poster art removed the original cropping of the photo (making it even closer to the original photograph), while an even more recent DVD release dropped the Stano inspired artwork altogether.
The advance poster for the upcoming film the Fantastic Four features Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd), Susan Storm / The Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba), Johnny Storm / The Human Torch (Chris Evans), and Ben Grimm / The Thing (Michael Chiklis). (Perhaps their arch enemy Doctor Doom will make an appearance in the final domestic one-sheet.) Like the previous Marvel Comics film adaptation, the Fantastic Four seems to be following the look and feel established by X-Men — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can see an earlier version of this photography/artwork (with slightly different posing and less retouching) in this Fantastic Four promotional photo.
