A “Brief” History on Movie Posters

Table of Contents

Dedications 3

Introduction 6

A “Brief” History on Movie Posters 7 Lights, Camera, “Action!” 11 Oh the “Drama” of it All 20

Into the House of “Horror”s 29

Cool Info Now What? 40

Getting Started 41 Early Design Process 43 The Hunger Games 48 The King’s Speech 59 A Quiet Place 72

Crooked Jewels 83

Conclusion 92

Works Cited 97

Images Cited 98

Introduction

In all honesty, posters are my favorite form of advertisement. They don’t interrupt my YouTube videos like trailers do, and they don’t fill up my mailbox with paper that I’m going to throw out and then feel bad about because man, that’s a lot of wasted paper. They simply come across my Twitter feed or catch my eye as I’m walking through the mall and then, quietly, they’re gone, replaced by the next ad. Surprisingly, that really encapsulates the life of a movie poster: there one moment and then gone the next as it’s replaced by something else. But a movie poster that has been well designed can stay with us forever and inspire us to do the thing it was made to do: see the actual movie. But looking at movie posters, I started to notice a trend that led to me asking the question “Why was it designed like this?”. That trend being the need to include every actors’ face in the poster when there was so much else to work with. Oftentimes, we know who’s in the movie, with the digital age upon us it’s hard to ignore the posts of confirmed actors or even look away from the high budget trailers that advertise the movie, so why have a need for this sort of layout? This led me down a rabbit-hole of questions and research regarding movie posters.

Posters made to advertise certain films have a lengthy and interesting history, but even more interesting are the designs behind them. The designs themselves have to be just right to make any person think to themselves “Oh wait, yeah, I wanna go see this movie”, but, as technology improves, movie plots and genres evolve, and socio-political climates change over time, so too has poster design. As such, one can’t help but wonder: with all these different genres, designs, and styles, is there any overlap in design? Are there any design elements that commonly appear in the posters under one genre? Or are posters truly unique in design every time one is made? Finding answers to these questions will be my overall main focus. While taking a look at how action, drama, and horror posters have evolved throughout the years, I will be looking at what exactly goes into the design of each decade. I will then look specifically at current trends and see if they do, in fact, share similar elements of design, making the viewer subconsciously link the poster back to a certain genre. Finally, I will be taking this knowledge and applying it to three movies and their posters, redesigning them in the process, and creating brand new posters, one for each of the aforementioned genres. So, let’s get on with the show! But first, some history!

A “Brief” History on Movie Posters

Posters have been around for approximately 200 years as of me writing this book. However, in comparison to now, they were extremely time consuming to make and weren’t really worth the money it took to make them (“A Brief History,” “Poster”). This all changed when, in the late 19th century, Jules Cheret, a famous painter and lithographer who was known for his posters and is regarded as the father of the modern poster, was able to improve the methodology used to print posters with a new, streamlined process called lithography (“Jules Cheret,” “A Brief History”). He not only made posters a worthwhile investment through a simplified method using just three stones and a single ink on each, he also proved that these posters could be engaging with this technique, displaying vibrant colors and even textures (“A Brief History,” “Poster”). Companies quickly picked up on this improved form of printing and began using it as a form of advertisement, starting the era of the poster in the 1890s, in which these posters were in high demand. Companies hired artists to create lustrous and eye-catching designs for their products, eventually garnering enough interest that people wanted these beautiful illustrations for themselves to the point of actually taking the posters down and bringing them home with them to store for later.

It was around this time that cinema really came into being, so it’s only natural that as posters grew in popularity, they were also used to advertise new films. While Cheret made a poster in 1890 for a short film in which the design features a young woman informing the viewer the show times (see page 4), it is not actually considered the first ‘movie poster’, and is closer to an ‘infographic’. Instead, Marcellin Auzolle illustrated a poster for the silent short film “L’Arroseur Arrosé” five years later; the design was fully illustrated, showing the audience

(L’Arroseur Arrosé, 1890)

in the foreground and the movie that was being advertised in the background. This was the first poster to visually depict the film being advertised as, up until this point, posters had only boasted about the visual quality of the films and the technology used to make them, never actually showing what the film was about in their designs (“History of Movie Posters“).

From here cinema began to bloom all around the world, from the United States to the United Kingdom, from France to Germany, from Poland to even the Soviet Union, and with these films came the posters to advertise them. It became the standard to depict something from the movie, be it the actors, a scene or two, or even the mood or themes that feature throughout the runtime. Along with this, movie posters featured the title, the director, and, after 1910, the actors that star within the movies (Dacre 10, “How Has the Evolution of Film”). Depending on the decade, there are also some overarching design choices that arise with each era of cinema. For example, there was a major shift from the 1950s to the 1960s in poster design that will be addressed at a later time in depth. From here, however, the similarities end. Depending on the genre of the movie and the location in which the movie is released, the design can change quite drastically, from type to color schemes to overall layout.

In the following pages I will be focusing on genre specific posters. Before I get into that, however, I feel I should give a quick rundown of the general design of posters found in each decade. So, strap in ‘cause we’re about to go through over 100 years of design history:

1910s The overall design of the 1910s was fairly simple: illustrated scenes from the movie featuring a few of the actors paired with handset type. The only major thing to note for this decade is that people began demanding that the actors be featured on the poster so that they knew who they were going to go see. Actors weren’t mentioned on the posters beforehand because film companies didn’t want their employees to demand a higher pay raise, which unfortunately still sounds very similar today (“History of Movie Posters “).

1920s Ah, the Roaring Twenties. Here, the silent film reigned and a booming economy led to better architecture in movie theaters, which in turn drove the incentive to watch movies up. Naturally, poster design had to keep up and, in doing so, leaned into being more of an art form. Improved printing led to greater details and overall design hand drawn illustrations over stills from the movie itself (“History of Movie Posters “).

1930s There’s something about the design of Art Deco that really intrigues me and itches my design brain. Posters in this decade were in the Art Deco style: the iconic sharp lines, geometric shapes, and bold colors associated with the style were heavily featured and therefore appeared in many designs at this time. Typography was bolder and stood out more while negative space, often just blank white spaces, began to be used as backgrounds as opposed to the heavily illustrated backgrounds stylized in the ‘20s. The illustrations that were included often showed the characters featured within the film, specifically their faces, over scenes within the movie. In this era, movies became a center point for society as more and more people visited the movies, despite the ongoing economic depression. Films thus began to be used as forms of escapism in the ‘30s, allowing people a brief reprieve from the raging