3D Materials and Concepts: Movie Posters

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

The Art of the Movie Poster: Highlights from the Mike Kaplan Collection

Poised at the frontier between high art and popular culture, movie posters are emblematic of modernity itself. On the one hand, they often deployed the most avant-garde formal and typographic trends of a given period, demonstrating true compositional innovation. On the other, they were advertisements, intended to stand out in the visual cacophony of the modern city and to attract the broadest possible audiences. Many people received an education in modern art and design history from movie posters, which are an essential link between fine-art practices and their distillation in everyday life.

According to Mike Kaplan, whose collection is founded on design, an ideal movie poster "captures graphically the creativity and emotion of the film-going experience" in a single image, while at the same time standing alone as a work of art and a souvenir of that experience. A designer, art director, and producer (The Whales of August, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) Kaplan has first-hand experience in crafting campaigns and posters, the most famous among them A Clockwork Orange(1971) and "The Ultimate Trip/StarChild" campaign for the re-launch of 2001: A Space Odysseyin 1970. David Hockney, Don Bachardy, Allen Jones, John Van Hamersveld, Andre Carillho, and British airbrush maven Philip Castle are among the artists and illustrators with whom he has collaborated. He is also a connoisseur of poster design history, gravitating toward exceptional illustrators, motifs, studio periods, national styles, stars, directors, and film genres.

Link to source to see and read more.

Source is LACMA

A History of Graphic Design, Guity Novin

I have to analyze the problem. What is the movie about? What is the story about? What is it trying to say? Whatever is the style of the movie? What kind of audiences I want to appeal to -- so that they get some sort of inkling about what the film is gonna represent. We try not to dissuade them from the realism of what the story is, and yet, we don't want to tell them too much.
Usually, we started by getting people in the department to do some logos, designs of what the lettering should look like. I usually read the scripts or I'll go to see the footage of the movie. I'll try to decide what would be the most marketable thing to say about the movie, and how to project it into a piece of art. Most of these things we did by hand and do the lettering and positioning and pasted all together and if we had to make a change we had to reap it apart and start over, With a computer you just almost press button and move things into place.

Bill Gold, Art Director and Graphic Designer

Link below to read the article.

http://guity-novin.blogspot.com/2011/09/chapter-46-history-of-american-movie.html

1910

Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

The Ransom Center's movie poster collection consists of an estimated 10,000 posters and spans the entire history of film from the silent era to the present day. All sizes of American film posters are represented: Window Cards (14" x 22"), Inserts (14" x 36"), Half Sheets (22" x 28"), One Sheets (27" x 41"), Three Sheets (41" x 81"), Six Sheets (81" x81"), and 24 Sheets (i.e.: billboards, 9' x 20.5').

The largest part of the collection comes from the Interstate Theater Circuit. At one time, the Interstate Theater chain consisted of almost every movie theater in Texas, and the posters, film stills, lobby cards, and press books form the foundation of the Ransom Center's film publicity collection. The Interstate posters cover the 1940's through the 1970's with a particular strength in the films of the 1950's and 60's, including musicals, epics, westerns, sword and sandal, horror, and counter culture films. The second major collection of Ransom Center posters is the Sills collection. Philip Sills was a poster dealer who donated his collection of B-movie posters to the Center in the 1960s. The third major collection was donated to the center by W.H. (Deacon) Crain, who for many years, served as the Center's curator of Performing Arts.

Digitization of these posters is an ongoing project, and this digital collection will continue to grow as the project progresses. Read more about the project on the Ransom Center's blog.

Read more about the Ransom Center's Film Collections

Link below to view collection.

https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll84