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How influential are posters in selling films?
ABC's Zak Hepburn chats with visual artist Sonny Day (one half of We Buy Your Kids, the team behind the #MIFF2015 artwork), film poster designer Jeremy Saunders (who has created posters for films including MIFF 2014's What We Do in the Shadows and MIFF 2015 Centrepiece Gala film Holding the Man), title designer Donna McCrum (Paper Planes, MIFF 2014; The Slap, MIFF 2011), comic book artist Bernard Caleo and VFX artist-turned director Jason Lei Howden (Deathgasm, MIFF 2015) to dissect the art of designing movie posters.
They will examine the importance of film posters in capturing the eye, establishing a sense of a film, and how to traverse the conflicting concepts of art and advertising.
Zak Hepburn is a Melbourne based film critic and programmer. Zak currently reviews films for ABC TV's national News Breakfast program and the weekly ABC Overnights radio program. His critical writing work has also appeared in various Fairfax Media publications. From 2010 he has curated film programs for numerous national cinema locations and film festivals, and he is currently the General Manager of The Astor Theatre. His passion lies in genre cinema but will watch anything that has a frame rate.
Jeremy Saunders has been described by aintitcoolnews as "one of the most interesting poster designers in the world today". He has created key art and titles for nearly 250 movies since 2002, including films by Lars von Trier, Steven Soderbergh, Andrea Arnold, Michael Haneke, Cate Shortland and David Michod. His increasingly panicked attempts to do almost anything else are routinely thwarted by a cruel and vindictive universe.
Bernard Caleo is a comics maker, publisher, preacher and teacher. He published the comics anthology Tango under his imprint Cardigan Comics from 1997 to 2009. In 2012 with filmmaker Daniel Hayward, he made the feature documentary Graphic Novels! Melbourne!, which they have toured internationally. With historian Alex McDermott he was a Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria 2013-14, working on their graphic novel The Devil Collects: Faust in Melbourne 1888. In September 2015 he is launching a graphic novel publishing project, Twelve Panels Press.
Webuyyourkids is Sonny Day & Biddy Maroney. Their work is a conversation between two individuals played out in colour, shape, texture and drawing from their shared influences: comic books, skateboarding, music and film. They work for clients big and small around the world, and since 2012 they have created many sold-out licensed film posters for cinema / pop-culture powerhouse Mondo, including two solo exhibitions in the company's Austin Texas gallery. They've also had solo exhibitions in Monster Children, Mart and MTV Galleries in Sydney and Lamington Drive in Melbourne, as well as contributing to many group exhibitions across the globe.
Donna McCrum has created opening sequences for feature films such as Cut Snake, Paper Planes, Galore and Somersault. Her applauded branding and titles design work in television includes Hiding, Offspring, The Slap, Wonderland, Puberty Blues and Tangle. Donna has also been responsible for extended visual 2D campaigns for productions including the feature film Dead Europe and the tele-feature Underground: The Julian Assange Story.
Jason Lei Howden’s first feature as a writer/director is splatter/comedy Deathgasm; it has been received in a flurry of cult hype and fantastic reviews. He has also written and directed four award-winning short films and while making them, worked as a VFX compositor on The Hobbit Trilogy, Ghostrider 2, The Avengers, The Great Gatsby and The Wolverine. Jason is currently developing several screenplays for a horror, a splatter and an action feature while he tours with Deathgasm.