The Art of Film Posters
One of the tasks that I set for myself in the beginning of this module was crafting a film poster for one of my FMP films for self-promotional purposes. As such, I decided that I would do a film poster for the project that I have been working on for almost a year now, which is “The Pillars of Creation”.
Since my project is a Sci-Fi film project, even though with a slightly different take (as I’m including the concept of alchemy in there), it was only natural that I would have to research for film posters based in that particular genre.
The Rise of Minimalist Film Posters?
And as I love the minimalist style being a minimalist myself, I thought that looking for minimalist design ideas was another good starting point. As such, my Google research turned up with quite a few concept ideas, some of them even being used for Sci-Fi.
However, there were a couple of issues with that particular minimalist design: First of all, these minimalist film poster designs are created by fans and third parties and thus are not representing the official film poster design as devised for the promotion and distribution of each individual film. As such, they hardly carry any value in regard to industry standards. Secondly, whilst these designs are nice to look at, they are only ever working for fans and/or audience members who have already watched the film and know what the story is about.
Since these designs only ever highlight a key element, item, or aspect of the film without revealing anything about the story itself, its sub-genre, conflict, or characters/actors (here, we also need to remember the marketing aspect of the star image as pointed out by Richard Dyer!), they hardly work in terms of engaging a possible audience or piquing interest for the film.
So whilst this would be a good poster design from a merchandise-standpoint, it was obvious that I would have to conduct more research – this time into the industry-relevant approaches and designs.
My Research: The History and Style of Sci-Fi Film Posters
Starting to climb down the rabbit hole of film poster design for Sci-fi in the past decades, I was confronted with a plethora of film posters and designs that quickly forced me to filter and cherry-pick certain films and their designs.
Whilst it would easily be possible to write an entire dissertation about Sci-Fi film poster design alone, this was not the objective for this blog entry, so in order to be able to navigate this area of research, I decided to settle on a few key examples relevant to my task and rather focus on the practical application of my research instead.
Drawn collages, as used by films such as Metropolis (1927), Barbarella (1964) and Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), have been the go-to method for most of
Strong colour palettes (unusual colours in the beginning to underline the strangeness of the new worlds/space to stark contrasts between light and darkness in order to embrace the vastness of outer space, such as employed by Star Wars (1977) and Blade Runner (1982).
During the late 70s/early 80s, the drawn style slowly but surely gave way to the inclusion of photos, photorealism and photorealistic aspects. As such, films such as Terminator and Back to the Future (both 1985) included photos of the main cast that have been mixed with graphic design elements.
With the increasing application of photos in film posters, Sci-Fi film poster designs became a lot more tangible and convincing. Some great examples of this are e.g. Alien (1979) and Solaris (2002).
Here, Alien was furthermore taking up the minimalist poster design as done by its forerunner Metropolis (1927) as it does not feature the most important cast and crew as selling points for the film, but rather relies on its design alone. This has been repeatedly taken up again since then by films such as e.g. I – Robot (2004), Transformers (2007), Wall-E (2008), and Tron Legacy (2010).
Looking closer to our time, and with the advancements of CGI, Sci-Fi was able to experience what I would call a Renaissance of sorts. Suddenly, very abstract Sci-Fi concepts that were just about thinkable, but not convincingly displayable on film became possible. This new change of dynamics also found its way into the design of movie posters, which is demonstrated by film poster designs such as for the film Matrix (1999), Signs (2002), I – Robot (2004), Transformers (2007), Wall-E (2008), Moon (2009), Avatar (2009) and Inception (2010).
As you can see, there is a variety of different Sci-Fi film posters out there.
With all of the above-mentioned examples, I realised some over-arching design concepts that have been used rather frequently. Some of them were (in no particular order):
Overlaying imagery (collages and/or double-exposures)
Display of main characters
Display of the locus of the story (usually a planet or outer space)
Dark or contrast-rich lighting for action-rich Sci-Fi
Whilst most of them are pertaining to either the action-packed Sci-Fi, space operas, and exploring Sci-Fi genres, there were also a few samples of socio-critic (Metropolis) and experimental Sci-Fi films (Solaris) present.
Since my own film project aims to be more of an exploring/mind-bending Sci-Fi, some of the above-mentioned styles naturally would not work well with “The Pillars of Creation”. However, upon revisiting the film posters, I realised that I not only liked the minimalist, clutter-free designs better, but also liked the concept of double-exposures (or artificially created double-exposures in post) really enticing and liked them better.
The Inspiration for My Idea
As such, I developed the idea of applying double-exposure using the face of our main lead and merging it with one of NASA’s images of “The Pillars of Creation”. Here, my idea was to find an image of our main lead where he – with an ethereal expression – either looks directly at the observer or just slightly past them, whilst keeping to the darker colour palette.
A Successful Recipe – Elements of a Film Poster
This section is more written for completion’s sake, as the research for it can be conducted quickly and literally just by looking at film posters. Just deducing from the above-mentioned examples, it was obvious that most of the following elements could be used for my own movie poster design. These were:
Title
Tagline
Names of essential cast
A billing block, and
Images (photos, illustrations, CGI)
With my visual idea, the above-mentioned elements in mind, it was now high time that I would look into the practical application of creating a movie poster. Thus, a quick round of research revealed several options to choose from.
My Research: Ways of Creating a Film Poster
Whilst online resources and patterns/templates are a tempting solution to my task and might be a good idea for quick mock-up solutions for underlining film poster ideas to an illustrator or producer for marketing purposes, providers such as Canva, Fotojet, Posterini, Studiobinder, and others can only ever offer quick solutions that risk appearing cheap and of inferior quality.
Furthermore, since using websites, patterns, and templates does not teach me any professional skills that I do require to have in this industry (and that are furthermore required for this module alone), I decided against them even though I took inspiration from the placement of certain elements such as for titles and sub-titles.
Knowing about the possibilities of Adobe Photoshop, I decided to venture once more into the wide realms of the Internet to research on how to create a film poster and what to look out for. As such, I decided that I would go down the trusty route of re-hashing and applying my rather basic knowledge of Adobe Photoshop in order to not only obtain my film poster for self-promotion, but also to expand my personal skillset.
Thus, I then ventured to the realm of Youtube University and looked up some helpful tutorials for creating film posters on Adobe Photoshop, two of which were really helpful:
And this one:
Update 4 May 2020: Application of My Learning
As such, and since the lockdown ever since the Covid-19 outbreak limited me in my choice of images to source from, I picked a still from one of my clips from Pillars of Creation in order to have a reference image and then ventured into obtaining the NASA reference image of “The Pillars of Creation”, which is free for commercial use.
Since I like the visual style of double exposures (especially done in post), I decided to give that a shot and implement it for my poster design. As such, I followed the advice of this tutorial here:
Although I do like this lighter style with the white background, I am not completely married to using it as a strict template. Whilst I will try implementing it in Photoshop, I do personally think that a darker design would be more befitting to the overall tone of “Pillars of Creation”.
And thus, I created my own film poster, even though it entailed a bit of getting used to Adobe Photoshop. Whilst I would have loved to create a true double exposure image that featured both features of our actor’s face and the Pillars of Creation, both images didn’t work well together due to their respective colour palettes, contrast ratios, and textures. Since I did not have much access to more applicable photos in lockdown, I thus decided that I would forfeit the facial expression of our actor and instead focus on his outline and other aspects of the composition, such as e.g. overall colour palette, which you can see here:
And after I settled on my most favourite colour palette out of all the options, I finally ventured into the text aspects of a proper film poster. However, since I am not as proficient (read: quick) in Photoshop yet and since the lockdown due to Covid-19 restricted me to only one editing computer that I needed to share with our editor Chloe (who had to edit our effects-heavy project for Pillars of Creation and thus needed all the time she could get), I instead decided that I would swap what would have become at least a day of experimentation and learning of texts in Adobe Photoshop with using a free billing block template from Studiobinder:
However, using that billing block template still required a bit getting used to and understanding the logic behind it, which still took a couple of attempts and tweaking to ensure that it was suiting my requirements and ideas. As such, I finally created this first draft of my film poster and asked my crew for their opinion on it:
After receiving a bit of helpful feedback – such as adapting the font size between the tagline and the title, adapting the lower credits, and the correct order of our contributors – I sat down again and created a second draft based on their feedback:
Finally then, after a break and a bit of tweaking that consisted of centring the text blocks and adapting their respective opacities as well as checking for typos, I finally came up with this final draft:
Whilst I would have loved to obtain some of the double-exposure image quality – especially with the longing gaze that our protagonist portrays in his reference image – I am quite aware that this would have required more time and resources on my end which I simply did not have access to due to the Corona pandemic.
If I was able to go back and redo it, I would most definitely play around a bit more with the software in order to get used to it better and I would see whether I would be able to create a better double-exposure image. I would also create my own film-poster-billing-block-and-text-template to use for future purposes and I would ensure to call in our actor again to grab a couple of more promotional photos for the film poster.
However, for the time being – and under the circumstances at hand – I am content with what I managed to accomplish. There’s only so much you can do when force majeure hits you after all.
References:
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