Horror Movies: Newspaper Advertising
I remember when these were actually in the papers, well not all of them i’m not that old, but these kind of ads were exactly what fuelled my curiosity for horror Movies and then once i got to work in the first video shop in my town…well, i don’t think i saw daylight for a good few years.
The Design of posters and ads like these were great, limited space to get the overall idea of what the movie is about and still visually interesting. I think some web banner designers could do with looking at these for inspiration on how to make use of limited space and keep it looking good.
The film titles were so much more imaginative as well. ‘The Blood Splattered Bride’ Awesome…i wonder if QT had called his film that instead of ‘Kill Bill’ whether it would has been as much of a hit?
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Rosemary’s Baby Poster
I’ve just finished these three versions of a poster for Rosemary’s baby…one of my favourite films ever.
I wanted to go another way a little and include Minnie and Roman in there as i think this adds a little more intrigue as to their role in the film if you hadn’t seen it already…who hasn’t seen it though right?
I also wanted to steer away from the colour green which seems to have played a huge part in previous posters, i’m sure due to the success of the original poster which was awesome. I did use the green for the title text on the middle poster though as na homage.
Hope you enjoy, please leave comments i would love to know whether you like these…or not.
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Rewind This – The Art of VHS!!!!
I cannnot wait for the documentary release ‘Rewind This The Art of VHS. I remember being a member at every video store i could in my home town. My forst job as a teenager was at the first video store in town…i would work on a Friday and Saturday and my boss would let me choose as many films as i wanted to watch and bring back early Monday morning.
This was at a time just before the big british ban on movies happened in the early eighties, so i managed to see some greats before they were taken off of the shelves…’Evil Dead’, ‘Cannibal Ferox’ etc…
The most fun i had though was looking at all the front cover designs, i was fascinated by them, often spending as much time staring at the artwork as watching the movie…i really miss Videos…i remember the day i gave all mine away, not that long ago…maybe ten or twelve years…sniff.
REWIND THIS! OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS:
An exploding industry without rules! Backyard filmmakers with zero budget and a surplus of dreams! Unchecked global piracy! The race to control media consumption! Videotape changed the world and laid the foundation for modern media culture. Low cost equipment created unprecedented opportunities. Major studios and small indies operated on an even playing field for the first time ever. The story of the home video revolution is a tale of both technological advancement and human ambition. VHS vs. Beta! Porn invades the home! Direct to-video madness! It’s all here, along with a rogues gallery of directors, rental employees, XXX vets, box artists, collectors, and more. Join the pizza party!
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Best Movie Posters Of 2012
Ok i’m sure there are tons of sites out there that are far more widely read and more reputable that are giving their own top 10 movie posters of 2012 but as far as i can see so far they have a couple of good ones but the rest are a bunch of Christmas cankers!!!
They have failed to miss some of the brilliant posters created by some fellow designers out there who designed and made great movie posters because they’re fan of the art, film, or film genre and many of these rivalled the official movie posters. There were some great official movie posters of course.
I love this poster and it should have been the official poster rather than the bland photographic poster that was actually released.
It wasn’t bad just disappointing.
Great work…this captures the abstract mood and concept of the film. The original poster, though good, depicted the film as a stalk and slasher and didn’t capture the other elements of the film. Whats great about this poster is that it doesn’t focus on one particular element of the film which gives me a sense of curiosity, which is good for a film this weird.
Official Teaser Poster
I don’t know who did this but its great. Loot at his eyes.
This is one of my faves. When it comes to reviving the old school style of the horror and action movie posters
of the 70′s the Dude is…well…The Dude.
Official Teaser Poster
Amazing poster for this movie that reminds me of my film watching experience as a young fan…
that the poster was sometimes better than the film!!!
Official Teaser Poster
Awesome. Great Graphic design, no photos, no Brad Pitt head = awesome!!!
Love this poster…a great alternative to the mirrored poster that was released which wasn’t bad and definitely worked its just i would have preferred this one.
Ok…normally i would hate the use of photography in film posters, this is because its normally a head badly placed on the canvas which generally makes for a boring poster more than anything, but MM uses photography from the film in a really cool and interesting way.
MM takes stills from the original footage (screwing with them a bit, adding grain etc) cropping and resizing the stills and placing them with other design elements to create abstraction. The end result are exceptionally cool posters.
I love the use of yellow in this poster. Again, i would say as much as i enjoyed the film this is a good example of a poster capturing your imagination in such a way that the film doesn’t quite live up to expectations created by the poster. Check out his site for more versions of this poster and other great work.
Official Poster
Great poster for this film which i have not seen nor heard of. i want to though…because of this poster.
Official Teaser Poster
Great poster…reminds me of the Poster for ‘Its Alive!” as well as one of the original posters for “The Exorcist” from the 70′s.
I love this poster. Great image, great typography, simple and effective.
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Design Mistakes – The Road To HillTop House A Retro Film Poster Part 2 by StudioDen75
So…this is what i should have done in the first place. I should have taken the time to step back and think about what was right or wrong about the previous final version before submitting it.
I guess what was great was that the editor said that i had the retro feel down but it was just too violent and i have to agree with him. It was my choice to put those images in and i should have thought about where it was being viewed…i’m a twat.
Anyway, this is the ‘NEW’ final version (i had to do it properly, i couldn’t just leave it) and i think this is about right and how it should have been done originally.
There is an element of PSYCHO here i know…i kind of like that reference, didn’t mean it to happen but there you go.
So i decided to make it portrait rather than landscape, thereby compacting the overall composition without losing the overall bg shape and design just cutting down on space. Made the house bigger. I wanted to keep the girl in the same position as before because i really like her hand reaching out to the audience from the poster. I also added a figure in the top right background by the house to add a little more info…i think this works, most important is that the violence is implied and not in your face which leaves more to the imagination…i think.
What do you think…any criticism is welcome.
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Design Mistakes – The Road To HillTop House – A Film Poster by StudioDen75
I thought it important to be honest and show the mistakes that i make as a designer as well as any successes so…i got asked to do a little tutorial for a certain magazine. It was late last week and they needed something quick. They asked me to do a tutorial based on a design i had done previously called ‘The Road to Hilltop House’ which was a horror film poster design based on the old horrors of the 70′s and 80′s. Unfortunately i didn’t have access to the original file as it had died with an old hard-drive so i didn’t have the images used and felt i could probably do something a little better and said i would create a new one based around a similar theme.
They agreed and i set to work ‘”re-creating” the old one as something new.
I had problems with the old one, i though the perspective had gone wrong in it and that took something away from the idea. So i hurried to come up with something new while keeping the idea of the overall design of the old one.
Here is the old one
Now there are things i don’t like about this as a film poster. I think the type used for the ‘credits’ section is a little too heavy and needed kerning and the distortion of the type for the main title is wrong and badly placed so that the perspective ends up looking wrong, i also think that the overall colour needs a little tweaking to make it a bit darker…the house is a little hidden underneath textures and scratches, but i do like the composition of the road and the placement of the house.
Now here is the new one that i did for the magazine tutorial…which they said was ‘Too Extreme”.
Perhaps they’re right…what do you think?
Well, to be honest i agree with them. Kind of. Furthermore, everything about this poster works, except for one thing…the guy with the knife.
I now realize, that, under pressure to create something quickly and to the brief, and this is regardless of whether it was too violent or not, i made a fundamental flaw in designing this…i think i gave too much away. I would want to see this movie cos i like gore and slasher films but i would want to see the movie that is the older version more because it suggests a whole lot more…could be a slasher movie, could be a ghost movie…Y’know something kind of scary is going on because the style of the poster, dirty, grungey and scratchy, along with the typeetc tells you this isn’t a wholesome family comedy, right? But it also leaves your own imagination to wonder what is going on…who is the little girl? What goes on in the house to make her so curious as to who lives in it…you’know that whatever is there she shouldn’t be going up there.
So from that point of view it works and the composition is pretty good i think, just could have been taken further and smartened up a little.
The problem with the second one, though i think it’s more in line with the style is it is just too obvious…the guy with the knife is too blatant and you know the whole story….’people go on the road to HillTop House and get murdered by whoever’…now, there is nothing particularly wrong with that concept…many movies have been released with that concept but i shouldn’t have designed it with the guy behind her like that…even though i’m quite happy about the overall end result regarding composition and style i don’t like the guy there and i think it could have been better executed.
What i do like about the second one is the girls hand reaching out beyond the poster to the audience, which i think is the main thing that works about this poster…its just that guy…too much.
It would have been better to have someone standing in the shadows at the top of the road by the house…or someone in one of the windows…anything else but the guy with the knife.
So for my own sanity i’m going to change it to something i think works better.
I’ll post as soon as i’ve finished it.
Hey…making mistakes is how we learn right?!?!?!?
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The Beautiful Vector Illustrations of Michal Bialogrzywy
Hey, i’m not, i admit, a huge fan of vector illustration; to me a lot of it looks far too cartoony and a lot of the illustrations that have been trendy over the last few years tend to be stuff where the illustrator MUST fill the entire canvas with pattern over pattern intertwining with type and shape and the need to include every colour under the sun and a character that has wobbly face and hands, basically, too much going on for me and more a show of technique rather than a show of good design…Michal Bialogrzywy’s stuff though…is dead cool.
I love his limited use of colour and he certainly has a wicked eye for space and balance.
It’s also nice to see a slightly different take on the Horror poster, a couple of variations on Suspiria here (i love that movie) and i think Michal Bialogrzywy’s interpretation of the film is awesome, if a little of brief slightly, i mean this only in relation to the mood of the film which must be very hard to illustrate…but i’m being picky, hell, i couldn’t do better…and if these come up for sale i’ll be buying a copy for sure.
My favourite work here is the last illustrations, the kind of sci-fi ones, wow!! The way he’s used black and grey as his main colour palette in the latter ones and only used the least possible elements of one other colour is brilliant…love it.
Michal Bialogrzywy is an illustrator/graphic designer from Poland
Don’t ask me to pronounce his name though…i just end up dribbling.
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What If…Movies reimagined in another time by Peter Stults
This is a great idea!!!! You gotta love these Reimagined Film Poster by Peter Stults…my fave is the Terminator posters and Groundhog Day for out and out getting it right and Die Hard cos its just an hilarious concept…Leonard Nimoy indeed. Hilarious!! Anyway, they are all great for one reason or another…i also love the James Dean ‘Drive’ Poster…how awesome that would have been.
Kudos to Peter though for generally getting the mood as far as colour and typography right and just the general layouts are awesome. Even his choice of Directors is cool: Jean Luc Godard directing Trainspotting, perfect choice, William Freidkin and John Frankenheimer directing the Terminator films, respectively, genius, and the best of all is Drive directed by John Ford which would have been an awesome film. . You can buy these prints at his shop here.
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Berto Martinez – Illustrations
I don’t know much at all about Berto Martinez other than he is from Barcelona and he is one amazing artist. I have stated on here a few times now (and probably will many times again) how much i love the work of Illlustrators like Robert McGinnis and Berto is in that calibre. I also love the way he has coloured his illustrations and how he keeps his little watermark mistakes which add to the overall look. Brilliant and Beautiful stuff man!!!!
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