Today I spoke to Ryan my cinematographer about a potential Film Poster for our short film. Though this is not an essential part of the project we felt like it would be a nice thing to do to market the film or to give it a more professional and industry standard feel. I also spoke about this to my Producer Yiannis who was also very happy with the idea, so we began putting together some ideas. Ryan is an excellent artist and has agreed to make some concept art for me to look at. Aswell as being cinematographer Ryan has been heavily involved with the set design and artistic direction of the film, as we have relied heavily on sketched out images as key props.
My initial idea was to shoot something on 35mm film and then process that to a digital image we can edit on photoshop and other digital image editing software. As a huge fan of 35mm photography I feel like it would be something different, and it would be nice to experiment with rather than doing everything digitally like we have thus far. I also feel that the contrast of colour on 35mm film is greater when you make use of very few contrasting colours. For example if you are shooting against only two or three different primary colours 35mm film captures that very well opposed to many colours which seems to make more sense to capture digitally. If we were to shoot the main image we were using for the poster on 35mm, I could use a full roll of 36 exposures, develop them and pick the best image from the lot. This way we can experiment with different lighting techniques during the same roll of film.
It is no secret I am a very poor hand-drawn artist. So far I've left the bulk of that to Ryan. Despite this I knew what I wanted visually, in terms of character and set positioning, and also where I wanted the film title, taglines, credits etc. I made this very quick sketch below so Ryan has something to go off. A particular shot in our film so far I feel sums up the overall tone and mood of the film we are creating, but also captures the essence of our main character. The character is on his knees facing a wall plastered from top to bottom with posters and theory information. The shot is from the rear of the character at a long shot capturing both the character and the posters facing down at him. Smoke rises in the air between the character and the posters creating a very sinister and hostile setting which the character inhabits. This is reflective of his mood - broody, frustrated, torn apart.
Ryan also had the idea to include some sort of concept art of surrounding planets. I liked this idea and as you can see from the poster the character is circled by planet like images. This would be done through chalk or finite pencil sketches, which would then be digitally transferred onto the film image. Below the character and the surrounding planets stands the tall and wide film title which dominates the image. 'NEMESIS' is dead centre covering almost all of the bottom third. Below that would be the tagline, then the credits. I feel like this is a nice simplistic layout which is visually effective. We are not breaking any conventional rules of film posters only aiming to experiment with the way we are creating an image through the use of 35mm film. However this might turn out to only an idea and nothing more. We may resort to using digital imagery as it may transfer easier, but we will see as we will probably be making the poster in the last week of post-production.
Below is an image which served as the main inspiration for the poster. The rising smoke from the character, the body positioning of the slumped over shoulders and the holding of the head suggests the fed up attitude of the character. The very few contrasting colours help create an extremely visually striking image which is also crisp.
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