Making movies means a lot more than ‘making the movie’! Forget the writing, planning, casting, begging, jumping, twisting, filming, editing, composing, proof reading, rendering, waiting, self pep talks, well… the list goes on. And that’s even for the ‘big guys’. For the micro independent – many times all that comes from one person. Doesn’t mean that dozens of others didn’t help or take some of it on or make it all possible, it’s more about the weight of responsibility that falls on one person’s shoulder’s that everyone else looks to as opposed to teams of people taking on their assigned tasks.
One of the steps for the DIY filmmaker is creating the marketing materials; the key art and the press kit.
Kerberos
Key art basically wraps around creating a poster. Some variation of it is probably going to become your website, your box art, and maybe incorporated into your press kit. I can’t speak to the issues that every movie has, but there might be lessons that creating the poster for KERBEROS that can help out, or apply, or maybe even inspire.
KERBEROS, the name taken from the three-headed dog which guards the gates to Hades in Greek mythology, was certainly not a monster movie. Rather, it’s about three men, and the personal hell they have created and now fostering on others in a grueling thirty-six hour timeline of violence, double dealing, corruption, and survival.
One of the lessons I took to heart a few years ago at the American Film Market from my friend Ken Olandt (actor, producer, and executive producer) was that though my stars might have great faces, they are not faces that any one knows yet. So, to stay away from the floating heads type picture which dominate the shelves of the video stores and certainly the halls and rooms of the American Film Market!
I of course fought against that idea. My thought being that if I treated my actors like stars, they would be perceived as stars. I still think there is a lot of value in that idea. But Ken’s advice was to find that one iconic image that represented the film and the story. That at this stage, and hopefully in my case for my entire career to come, is that what I am creating as a movie is about the story – not the personalities of the actors we used to tell it. Think of the art for American Beauty… or better yet, go to a site like TCCandler.com and look at his idea of the 100 greatest movie posters. Many of those posters end up on other people’s lists as well. If you look at them, there are only a couple faces that really sell movies, pretty much the ones you’d expect; Tom Cruise, Jim Carey, Jack Nicholson. Thanks Ken for making me take a second look and rethink my concepts!
So a micro budget film made with a micro crew. Not much room or surprise when there are not stills of every scenes, or even less likely, the perfect stills for the key art to start with. I had always thought to do a photo shoot to create the poster, and had two very firm, very workable concepts. I also knew that there is the magic that happens when it’s for real – or as real as it can feel and seem in the middle of shooting a feature film.
From early in the filming and editing, there was one image that I kept coming back to that I felt summed up the entire struggle of our main character, Mike Finn and the theme of the movie. Yeah, that part is played by me. And no, that doesn’t make it easier. It makes it harder. It adds to the second guessing of is this really was the perfect image. But as a director, writer, actor, filmmaker, I’ve learned to trust my instincts. Is there ego involved? Of course. I’m a director, writer, actor, filmmaker. Still doesn’t stop it from being the perfect image!
It’s also not recognizable as me, unless you know me really, really well. And I’m hoping our audience is bigger that just my immediate friends. Already, people who have seen it questioned me about is the shot one of the other two main leads in the film.
The image had it’s issues though, the first of which is that it was starting as frame grab. A still pulled from the original footage. Fortunately, we shot in High Def with the Sony EX1. Not at 3K or 5K Red, but still better than my first film’s Mini DV. So, where to start?
Well, as a 1080P frame grab, at 300 dpi, we’re only talking about a 6.4″ x 3.6″ image. That has to fill up a 41″ x 27.5 frame (American poster size). That’s a pretty big blow up! Now take in the totally incorrect aspect ratio which means a radical cropping of the image – somewhere down to about 2.5″ x 3.6″. Eeesshhhh.
Even worse, the shot itself was not the sharpest or most perfectly focused shot of the movie. It’s taken from the middle of an action scene. So, where to begin?
I started in Photo Shop of course. There are several plug ins that use fractal mathematics for their enlarging algorithms as opposed to the bi cubic and nearest neighbor formulas native to PS. I tried several different ways, but eventually settled on Alien Skin’s Blow Up. No mater what though, at that extreme enlargement, you introduce a LOT of artifacts. Fortunately, I knew I wanted something with a lot of grit and grain structure to it anyway.
The idea of the apparent reflection, actually a mirror images in concept, also filled up a huge part of the final poster, so I could get even more milage and not blow up the original quite as much. Even more important, it fit my concepts of the movie and story perfectly. Not just okay – but perfectly! The struggle against the good and bad, the losing battle of falling into Hell, the struggle to stay out and fight against the character’s inherent nature, the duality of good and evil. So like the story itself, this then became what the poster was about.
First I did a low rez mock up – just a quick placement of the images and some basic text blocked in. Ultimately, I ended up spending 2 full working days to create the mock up, leaving myself open to ideas of different color schemes but searching, much as I do in my color grading of the movie, for something that has strong contrast and colors but still feels naturalistic – skin tones are skin tones, blood is blood, and whites are white. The placement of the text – the composition and cropping of the images, came pretty quick. When it’s right, it feels right, and then everything else just feels wrong!
Radical manipulation with levels and curves, some highlight painting, the addition of additional film grain were added. There are also programs and plug ins that work within PS to add very realistic exposure and grain that emulate different film stocks. I played and experiment with them all.
I also utilized transfer modes – duplicate layers and how they work with each other and affect different parts of the image. The final image was made up of maybe 8 layers in different transfer modes with different parts of the image masked out and or erased to reveal what I wanted. This then became my basic image.
Next was bringing in the overlay elements. These were taken from low rez scans found on the Internet which were in turn taken from images of Hercules capturing Kerberos as his 12th trial. I looked at dozens of images, and settled on 2. These again had to be blown up – this time even more, though much of their details were not as important. Judicious painting, smoothing, sharpening, and ‘painting’ as well as some interesting color shifts and manipulation made the final image.
I again experimented with dozens of combinations and orders for transfer modes and placement, searching for lines and images that complimented and contrasted in interesting ways. I strive to find patterns that work from both 30 feet across a room and from just a few inches.
Once happy, I started bringing in a variety of textures and colors to overlay, searching for a combination that would compliment the overall design, add visible punch, and continue to tell the story of my original concept. The textures are a combination of paper textures, film textures, and some shots I took of the basement walls. The use of advanced transfer modes within Photoshop’s normal layers gives much more control and use. Mostly this is lot of experimenting, especially when you start to play with hue and saturation and color balance as the effect of the transfer mode changes radically.
The final touches to the images came from merging all the textures, then rearranging how they were placed to create the final composition in terms of both images and colors. The chains were brought in and placed, and the watch hands were made to read at 12. Dodge and burn brushes brought out the image more, and then lots of manipulation of separate adjustment layers for hue and saturation, levels, and curves were used. To help tie in all the disparate tones of the image, I settled on a bluish gray solid with a prominent monochromatic noise added and then used a soft light transfer mode to help tie it all together. This too was judiciously erased and masked in places where I liked certain elements popping through as they were.
I like the idea of using the most basic or cliche font’s – hopefully in ways that seem a bit unexpected, or sometimes to use them exactly as expected to serve as counterpoint to the unexpected image. In this case, I used 2 classic movie fonts, Impact and Trajan. I worked and tried about 20 other bold, compact fonts, but in this case nothing looked as good. I kept switiching them out as I pulled and distorted fonts, I distressed fonts, and tried dozens of colors and textures that complimented what was going on within the poster. Still, I think these classic fonts work as stated above, in counterpoint to the complexity of the image itself.
I did a quick mock up of the credits in Steelfish – a free movie font that does a remarkable job of looking professional with a minimum amount of work. Here again, people can argue that Univers is the type of choice, but there is no one standard font that someone has to use, and some will say its used too often. But the Univers family works because of it’s clean vertical design and legibility especially as smaller type sizes, which allows a maximum of information in a minimum space. Univers Light Ultra- condensed (Univers 59) is one of the most used.
Once I had my basics laid out, I went into Adobe design to redo and lay out the stacked credits. The kerning and leading is much easier to work with in designated design program. Most graphic designers are probably used to Quark or In Design or Illustrator. If you are used to staying in PS for your text needs, you can theoretically do almost all the same things and PS text is also supposed to be vector based these days. I say supposed because the difference is really quite pronounced and where as it’s okay in Photo Shop, it looks amazing when done in a dedicated design program such as the one’s mentioned. Stacked credits are not difficult – just tedious.
So though I am still investigating other fonts and ideas for manipulating them for the title, I’m pretty excited about the result. No matter who does the work, a poster design or graphic design firm, a friend who’s an artist or photographer, or your own skills and talents, it takes effort, time, experimentation, and work. But that’s the movie business, and the work is important. Remember that no one gets to watch the movie before they do – they make their decisions based on word of mouth, reviews, ads, trailers, and the artwork.
So, now onto the press kit…
kely mcclung
