Factory Girl movie poster

Factory Workers

Factory Girl movie poster
Factory Girl movie poster contest

Design a Factory Girl movie poster

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 out 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 Factory Girl movie poster contest kit (ZIP) includes “15 different images from the film, 6 different Title Treatments, and the billing block”. It also offers a Factory Girl sample (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:

Factory Girl movie poster
Factory Girl 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?

If you are curious, here is the winning Factory Girl movie poster entry created by Dimitri LaBarge.

Buy Factory Girl movie posters at: AllPosters, eBay, Amazon