Fewer, however, may be aware how much work goes into the creation of a movie poster. During the golden age of film, movie posters and lobby cards were often the first impression a moviegoer was given of coming attractions; the best ones were carefully crafted to accurately portray the film’s overall mood, and aesthetic. With trailers and teasers readily available online, it could be argued that movie posters are almost an afterthought in this day and age, but they remain a time-honored and much-loved aspect of the process of making a film and sharing it with the world.
When making the movie poster for The Warriors of Jinnea, we wanted to capture not only a sense of the film, but also pay homage to the many great films that made us want to become a part of the movie-making business to begin with. We studied dozens of movie posters from greats such as the original Star Wars Trilogy, the Indiana Jones films, Lord of the Rings, and many others. With my additional background in comics, I spent a long time staring at my favorite trade paper backs, trying to decide how I wanted to approach my first attempt at making a movie poster – ever! This is what I presented to Jonathan Zeppa on the 10th of January, 2011.
Jonathan was very busy with post-production during this phase – principal filming had wrapped several months prior, and he and John McCorkle were working on editing - but we planned a meeting for a few weeks later. In the meantime, I tinkered with my initial design, working with what few notes he was able to give me on such short notice: “Get rid of the trees in the background”, and “See if you can fit the Legionnaires in there somewhere.” As you can see by the following redraft, little else changed.
Upon meeting, it was decided that we wanted to move a little closer to Lord of the Rings in terms of style and color palette, so I found a generic parchment background image – mostly to use as a placeholder until I could find or produce something better – and applied a sepia color treatment over the entire poster. We also decided that the image of Jonesy (Adam Smith) was taking up a little too much real estate and felt distracting. We found a more subdued picture of him – one which we felt better encapsulated the personality of his character – and repositioned it. One thing we both couldn’t see changing was the hand in the center. Much like the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, the Ingots of Dainbridge were more than just a prop; they were a major plot device, and practically a character in and of themselves. We knew that the open hand with the Ingots resting in it was going to be the iconic centerpiece of the poster, and as you will see, it changes very little throughout the entire process.
We knew we were getting close, but it still didn’t feel right. Jonathan left it in my hands and returned to the editing process, with the agreement of meeting within another week or two, once I felt ready to move on. I felt the biggest problem was placement. It felt cramped, and somehow rushed as a result; there was something out of balance.
Additionally, I spent some time putting together a billing block (that’s what those in the industry call the credits at the bottom of most movie posters) and put a tentative release date at the bottom, one which would eventually be pushed back several weeks, as Jonathan was still in negotiations with the Flagship Cinema in Mechanicsburg, PA, regarding our booking date.
During the next week, I came up two variants of the poster, the latter of which Jonathan had printed – thanks to the wonders of cloud computing, we were able to do many of these types of transactions remotely, saving us both time and gas money – and brought it along with him for our next meeting.
The printed version was very useful, as it allowed me to pin it to a wall and walk away from it. Sometimes, when you’ve stared at a thing for 30 or 40 hours on a computer screen, you lose a vital real-world perspective that can be crippling to the creative process. I used the printed version to plan what changes we wanted.
With this in hand, I was able to make a much cleaner looking poster. I tried aligning the title differently – we almost immediately decided that this looked wrong, and scrapped it – and I also spent several hours extracting cleaner, higher res version of the source imagery (much of it was derived from lower res stock for space conservation purposes), cleaned up the edges and the color balance, and basically remade a significant portion of the poster as precisely as possible. It’s difficult to notice some of these things at this scale, but such thing make an enormous difference in printed versions, which use higher resolution graphics.
It was time for a final revision and sign off on the final product. In the end Jonathan was concerned that the parchment background looked too distinctive and might even have a copyright placed on it by whoever had created it, so we decided to make our own. And here, a little elementary school science project experience came in handy. We took a regular piece of course-grained Bristol paper – the kind typically found in sketchbooks – and painted it with wet teabags and dried it with a blow dryer. We did this about three times, scanned the result, and made some adjustments to the contrast and color balance, and as you can see, the entire posted was immeasurably improved and enriched by it. It added an organic quality I never would have imagined possible, and in many ways, I think it’s the element that really makes the poster stand out as a piece of art instead of just a Photoshop comp.
A few tiny edits and an update of the billing block later, we had a finished, fully realized movie poster.
Total working time: Roughly 60 hours from start to finish.
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