Help with WIP movie poster

HanSagan

Hiyas all,

I drawing close to completion on my epic featurette 'Mitsabis Dream', and I was doing some work on the poster/DVD cover. I got a little stuck, so I thought I'd post it here for some advice and painfully honest critique.

My current feeling is that its far too busy...is there anything else I should be looking at? I'm aware that its still a little rough around the edges.

Click here to view poster cause for some reason my site isn't letting me link images

thanks in advance

Garlic Bread

Yeah, it's way too busy

Maybe instead of using faces of every actor you could go for a simple look with just a clean looking symbol.

MagicToaster

Yeaaaaaah, there's too much going on for this posters own good. Focus on what's most important: Title, lead characters and an element that communicates what this film is about.

Don't forget that ppl have no idea what your movie is about, your poster should convey this to them.

Your pictures are pretty good, that's some good collaging you've made there!

Jinnigan

needs less faces

Kewop Decam

The poster is just doing too much without doing anything at all. My eyes are being lead all over the place in a disorientating way

UncleSam

my edit

Gaussian blurred everything except the two characters that seemed the most important. The way the gun is pointing to the right seems to lend itself to a horizontal layout, hence why I added the blank space. I dunno if just Gaussian blurring it is a good idea, probably maybe just less saturated/more muted tones instead of blurred. Just my two cents.

MagicToaster

UncleSam wrote: »

my edit

I dunno if just Gaussian blurring it is a good idea

The problem is that it's still crowded.

UncleSam

MagicToaster wrote: »

UncleSam wrote: »

my edit

I dunno if just Gaussian blurring it is a good idea

The problem is that it's still crowded.

Well, then just narrow it down to the two main figures in the poster, with maybe the space battle in the background, then.

NibCrom

A HUGE problem with the original is that the guy with the gun is leading the viewer right off the page.

srsizzy

Yeah, I'd say make a title and room for the bottom text and shape somewhat around that. Less people. Background. Yeah. You should probably start over, there's not a lot to build off of here.

The One 52

It's too much crowded, and in my opinion... floating heads are always weird for movie poster. That's what the Hollywood studios always resort to to promote the actors. But I always thought that while it was also a lack of imagination. (And when they do have good ideas, they ruin it with floating heads. Just look at DVD covers: they'll put floating heads of actors everywhere to fill the space, even if the teaser poster was good on it's own and original. Apparently, you have to put floating faces everywhere to sell those movies...)

My suggestion is go with something much simpler that automatically catch our attention as we lay our eyes on it. Right now, it's like: "Well, what am I suppose to focus on?" You can keep floating heads if you want (I just have a personal grudge against 'em, it's just a personal opinion ), but keep it simple, and choose an element that will come out and keep our attention, and put emphasis on it.

Otherwise, it's just look messy and a half-done job, even if you put hard-work into it.

supabeast

You have enough stuff in there for three posters. Scale back to one big main character, one smaller other character, and a background set. Or two big characters and a couple others scaled down really small. But find a balance, and arrange them so that they relate by size and position.

Also, where’s the text? You should layout all of your text first, then start working on the photomontage. That way you don’t spend a whole day comping the photos together and realize that there’s nowhere to put an explanation.

Kewop Decam

OP hasn't responded to any comments.

heeeeeeeeelllllooooo, are you there?

ENERjAKzero

He's working on it

HanSagan

sorry, went away for the weekend.

Thanks for the comments all, I'll do some tweaking.

HanSagan

Updated. tweaked and re jigged...still busy, but hopefully in a more balanced way. I was aiming to recreate the feel of an early 80's movie poster, back when they still hand painted them, and the streaks are supposed to reflect the rain thats a feature of the film and to make it look kinda noir-ish.

Tell me if I've succeeded

Updated Poster

supabeast

It’s better, but there’s still too much going on, and almost everything about the composition is arranged so that it guides the eye directly left, away from the poster.

Less is more. Meditate on that for a day, then start cutting more out.

NibCrom

supabeast wrote: »

It’s better, but there’s still too much going on, and almost everything about the composition is arranged so that it guides the eye directly left, away from the poster.

Less is more. Meditate on that for a day, then start cutting more out.

I agree. The guy with the gun is still pointing the viewer directly off the page (think about focal points and how our eyes are directed to them.) The ship on the left has the same problem. There's also too many different sized heads/people. If its absolutely necessary to put all those people in, consider putting them all at the same size so it's easier to digest. All of the little faces just aren't adding much to the composition. If you think about most movie posters, they're usually aren't this many people in them. I think you are on the right track, there are just too many things in the poster that don't really grab my interest. The effects are pretty decent.

Szechuanosaurus

Wait...you're the actual artist for the original comic...?

Have you tried drawing the poster? If nothing else, you might come up with a more interesting poster design than the standard generic sci-fi poster.

Cheebahawk

You should take out all of the little faces on the left, the only purpose to have them there would be if they were A-list hollywood actors. As they are now they don't explain the story anymore than having the two main stars and the spaceship fight at the bottom.

I also like how you've replaced the space scene, this one looks much better than the original.

Simply having a black space in place of the floating heads would probably work fine, it would cause the eye to goto the right of the image before being drawn to the left by the gun, balances it out a bit.

NibCrom

Do an image search for "movie poster" and see what comes up. Most movie posters are very simple and need to be able to be "digested" very quickly. Even most collage style posters like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars don't have as many elements as yours does. It's really just too many different sized people/floating heads.

Shiboe

I like the newer version better as a whole, but I have to agree with most of the comments said. To me, it's not even that it's so busy, but the content is lacking. I look at it, and I see a bunch of heads. This would be ok if you were pushing big name actors and trying to focus on that. As is, I see a bunch of people I don't know, dramatically looking in random directions. Is it a movie about faces?

Honestly, I'd ditch all but 1-3 of the faces, and get on trying to convey something about the movie. From what little I can gather, it's something of a spaceship sci-fi yes? So why am I forced to squint to see what look like really interesting spaceship scenes. The one huge thing crossing the sunset looked particularly interesting, but they are just kinda dropped in the corner as an afterthought.

I like the rain effect, and it looks to help with the blends between images. Overall though, I think it would be better to have a large starship image split with 1 or 2 main characters. Looking at a bunch of faces I don't know doesn't do anything for me, and while compositionally this version is more pleasing, it just doesn't read as interesting.

Simply removing all (again ALL) of the little heads along the left would be a simple fix to both problems IMO. And honestly, while the dude with the gun is an interesting shot, it's too long at that size and draws most of the attention to the edge of the poster, if not off it.

Creambun 007

The text on the bottom needs to be A LOT bigger.