Film posters are brilliant.

I’m new to this directing lark. This will be my first proper time, it’s only a short, and I’m doing almost everything on instinct. So to begin with I thought well, what is the image? What is the look that begins to some up my film even before it has been cast or the script is finished? I remember reading somewhere, (I don’t know who said it and I don’t know where) but a screenwriter said he can’t start writing a script until he knows what the poster will look like.

So maybe that’s where my instinct comes from but that’s what I believe too. Films need to be visualised from day 1. They need an essence in an image as much as they need dialogue and scenes. So I started messing around with ideas of what my film is about and how I can entice people with a pre-production poster/image. I took a regular pic of a tree on my street it was blurry but a good start

This was my first design:

Too Modern, 2nd:

Again, too modern, wrong font:

Better, but not fantastical enough: Not much better:

The font is better but there’s no sense of fairy tale…

An improvement:

A more period font design but it doesn’t work really:

Same font different composition, but still not working:

You know what I thought scrap this tree idea it’s not working, it’s too minimal and It’s not working. Then I left it for a bit and had 2 vague ideas that went no-where:

Posters are so important, they entice and attract. From the situation I’m in it’s about bringing people into the project more than a marketing thing at this stage. Ultimately there are so many shorts being made out there and crew’s tend to work for next to nothing so I need to give them something that suggests a mood and an atmosphere for what I am aiming to create. My thinking is that alongside the script this will help a lot.

Next I went to my mate Tom’s house and took some pictures of some really really old books, this seemed to be working much more, and was in tune with the tale that’s in my head:

This was my first effort:

Looking good, but the font felt weak to me and too similar to the background handwriting texture.

And here we are, That’s how I got to the design. I think it sums up what we going for at this early juncture. I’m sure it will change.

Film poster design is a beautiful thing. It’s one of the great side elements that embellishes cinema. I have books and book on poster design. Here are some wonderful posters I have seen in recent years:

Finally – a bit similar here, but I love it – the new Daniel Day Lewis Paul Thomas Anderson movie about Texas Oil back in the day. The trailer is one of the best I’ve seen all year – There will be Blood




Matt Jones
Director/Writer/Producer