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Topic: Annoying movie posters.

Todd McCracken
Master Film Handler

Posts: 263
From: Northridge, CA, USA
Registered: Mar 2008

posted 12-09-2009 02:24 PM

quote: Mitchell Dvoskin
There is an excellent documentary that PBS airs every now and again called The Man Who Drew Bug-Eyed Monsters. It is the biography of artist Reynold Brown, who always dreamed of being a serious western landscape painter, but spent most of his life creating movie posters for monster and horror movies in the 1950's and 60's to support his family.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f-hXDOUiVE

Link to the full doc

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 12-09-2009 03:11 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Pixar doesn't give the sort of "top billing" or other mention of the voice talent (and other talent) in its movies. They don't do that with their movie posters.

I do believe Pixar DID put the names Tim Allen and Tom Hanks on the Toy Story 2 posters.

In general, Disney usually doesn't issue posters "with credits" for any of their animated films (there are the occasional exceptions). Some of the other studios have followed suit with this.

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Frank Angel
Film God

Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 12-10-2009 08:00 AM

It's been a strange tradition of using that elongated, tall typeface at the bottom of 1-sheets. Is that a unique font or do they just take a sans-serif and optically elongate it? I understand why they need to do it -- to fit all those credits in such a small space, but I would have thought that by now they'd have created a font specifically for that purpose, given that every poster under the sun uses it.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 12-10-2009 12:11 PM

Specific, ultra condensed style fonts are available and are used on the credit listings of most movie poster one sheet designs.

The designers are not supposed to take a normal width typeface, such as Arial Regular, and squeeze it to 10% or 20% of its normal width. And that's because that sort of type treatment only looks like shit and gives the design the horrible stink of amateur hour odor. It's rarely ever acceptable to distort type. It's almost as bad an offense in typography as setting a script in all capitals.

I don't know the name of the original typeface movie studios most commonly use for credit listings on posters, but URW created a version of it called "Bee" in four different face weights in the mid 1990s. Here's an example of it:

At times movie studios will also use more commonly available condensed typefaces. Univers Thin Ultra Condensed is one of the best, most common alternatives to Bee. The version from Linotype is better digitized and tracked better. However, it looks noticeably different from Bee. I used a compressed weight of Univers for some of the type in this image:

There's a growing number of other ultra compressed fonts that are weights of larger type families. I'm kind of surprised the growing number of choices aren't showing up on poster designs. Most of the credits are still set in Bee. It's just like the bigger type work being done in Trajan.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 12-11-2009 11:21 AM

I read somewhere that the reason for the tall/thin look of poster credits is also because the studio agrees to make the credits a certain point size.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 12-11-2009 12:02 PM

The studios go into even more detail on poster lettering sizes. Actors and other key people involved in the production may demand their credit listings be sized a certain percentage in ratio to the title and/or placed in front of the title in the lower block of listings and above the title for the large listings at the top of the one sheet layout. Any number of odd demands could be made regarding the poster layout as to how names are sized and arranged. Never mind the critical factor of geometry and whether all the elements will fit in the sizes being demanded.

I always laugh a bit at a movie poster credits list where one actor in the group demands to have a rectangle put around his name. I feel like the box needs the extra tagline "and featuring the special guest asshole: (actor's name)."

I can imagine a studio executive and talent agent arguing at length about stuff like this over lunch and then the poster design flunkie getting a long laundry list of crap he has to do to the copy. "Don't forget to use Trajan on the title!"

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