Anatomy of a movie poster....

Here's a one of the designs for a small film I worked on, "Turning Point 1977". Normally a client will give me pics from the onset photographer...."unit photography". I normally get between 1,000 - 2,000 pics to choose from, which I then put together to make the design that's in my head. The most pics I've ever had to look through was about 12,000....which took me 3 days to look over, for a poster that was due in 4 days. With "1977", there were just a few pics.....so I ended up using mostly stock photography.

Below are the original pics...except for the shot of the people, which I can't show because it's from the film. Putting these together to make the poster was actually quite easy....looking through thousands of stock photos and putting them together in my head as I went, was definitely the hard part. In LA, back when I first started, we didn't have much stock photography available, so we had to piece everything together....especially actors. Actors were almost never available to take photo shoots, so if we had the time, we would use body models....but mostly we put them together using unit photography. The most difficult design was when I had to piece together one actor from 17 different pieces.....that killed me. No matter how difficult, it has to look realistic...and the lighting has to be right.

I'm concentrating on my films now....so I won't be designing many posters from this point.....time to move on.....

The photos below are from "istockphoto.com".