Winnipeg Posters | Part 1- Initial Ideas
This month at Soda has seen me venturing into new ground as I undertook overseeing the design process for the poster of Guy Maddin’s ‘My Winnipeg‘. Usually something undertaken by our marketing manager Martin, this month the baton was passed down and I thought it might be interesting to others if I wrote something about the process.
Being a small company who outsources their design work, we roped in the lovely guys at ‘The Church of London‘ who recently provided the UK poster for California Dreamin (Endless) (& you may also know as the publishers behind ‘Little White Lies’). We were not only keen to work with these guys on a design basis for the first time, but also felt they would understand and translate the tone of the film well (those familiar with Guy Maddin will know that this won’t be your run of the mill floating heads poster- but I guess the same can be said about many a Soda film).
The next step was to ensure the designers and ourselves were on the same wavelength, so we needed to define what we wanted from the poster and thus drew together a design brief (down-loadable here). This sets out who the film’s target audience are, information about the film, recent releases that are thematically similar which may provide a good source of inspiration, as well as other not so thrilling ‘poster’ based information.
One question that some people may ask at this point- is ‘why were we looking to create a new design when there is already a US poster (c/o distributor IFC) available, as well as an international one (c/o international sales agents Maximum)?’. There are of course several reasons for this to happen, and its generally not an uncommon situation…
- Regional audiences: what may appeal to one regional audience may not appeal to another
- Different layouts: the US and several other territories use portrait shaped designs, where as the UK uses landscape designs known as ‘Quads’- and what sometimes suits a portrait design doesn’t work so well when flipped on its side.
- Star names: a poster focusing on a central cast/ crew member may be a big draw in one territory, whilst being unknown in another.
- Opinions & Taste: and of course there may just simply be a difference in design taste or opinion of those in charge of distributing the film.
This isn’t to say that we don’t review these existing posters, as there are still many cases where companies create ‘adapts’ (adaptations) of existing artwork. Looking over these we did feel drawn to the international artwork’s focus on the horses heads, (the image taken from a scene in the film which you can see below) and on reviewing the other stills available for the poster still felt that this was one which made an impact on us. We were however slightly torn, as the image alone is not entirely representative of the whole film- however this was weighed up against whether incorporating many stills may lessen the images impact. In the end it was decided that it would be good to see other possible directions for the design alongside adapts of the international artwork.
Finally, after sitting down to pass on and discuss the design brief and scramble of ideas with ‘The Church of London’, we simply had to sit back and wait while they pulled together their initial poster concepts…
Coming tomorrow: Part 2- First Concepts : in which we review the array of initial concepts from The Church of London and hope to find a more definite directionto take with the poster.