F

Flavorwire

Movie Posters

Film

Surprising Early, Alternate Versions of Iconic Movie Posters

By Jason Bailey on

Movie posters, as we’ve discussed before, are a tricky business, and a great movie poster must serve many functions: it must capture the essence of a movie, it must be aesthetically pleasing or interesting in itself, and it must sell the product in question. Unsurprisingly, the quest for that balance can result in reworking, re-imagining, and revisions galore, which is why the new Daybees online exhibit The Iconic Movie Posters That Never Were is so fascinating. In it, the designers behind some of Hollywood’s most memorable posters share their early drafts and alternate versions of classic posters; check them out after the jump, alongside the final drafts that became part of movie history, and visit Daybees to learn more about their creators. … Read More

Film

The Dirtiest Movie Posters of All Time [NSFW]

By Jason Bailey on

Late last week, the Internet collectively furrowed its brow, cocked its head sideways a bit, and then issued a unanimous “Ohhhh” and turned a little red before quickly closing the tab window as Lars von Trier unleashed the dirty/artsy poster for his latest film, the two-part, LaBeouf-enabling, unsimulated-sex epic Nymphomaniac. But how do Von Trier parenthetical genitals stack up against the cinema’s naughtier one-sheets? A roundup of some of the dirtiest movie posters to date after the jump. … Read More

Pop Culture

Wonderfully Geeky Pop Culture-Inspired Posters for NASA Expeditions

By Jason Bailey on

Points of primary interest aside, pop culture geeks and science geeks have a lot in common (let’s admit it: we all spent a lot of high school-era Saturday nights not on dates), so it’s nice to see that our interests can occasionally intersect. You see, whenever NASA sends an expedition to the International Space Station, they make a poster for said mission as part of their “Space Flight Awareness” program. On the early expeditions, these posters were pretty much what you’d expect: space-suited astronauts looking heroic, against a backdrop of a launching Space Shuttle or Planet Earth, with maybe a waving American flag thrown in for good measure. But about 16 missions in, they started getting inventive — making posters in the mold of famous movie advertising or aping pop culture imagery. Check out our favorites after the jump, and enjoy all of their posters to date (and some fascinating facts about the expeditions) on NASA’s site. … Read More

Design

Darkly Glamorous Posters for the Films of David Lynch

By Judy Berman on

The aesthetic of David Lynch is far easier to appreciate than to describe. Sure, there’s eeriness spike occasionally by true horror, a retro visual style, a fascination with the bizarre and uncanny. But Lynch is more than the sum of those parts. What’s particularly impressive about Sydney-based designer Jeremy Saunders’ LYNCHED posters is the way they contain both the darkness and the glamor of Lynch’s style. Minimalist in idea but not aesthetic, each focuses on a single object, highlighting the significance of details in the filmmaker’s work. Click through to see the series, which we discovered via BlackBook’s Tumblr, and visit Saunders’ website, where you might consider buying a print. … Read More

Art

Early Saul Bass Poster Sketches for ‘The Shining’

By Alison Nastasi on

Designers are often faced with demanding clients, and we can’t think of a bigger perfectionist an artist would be rattled to impress other than Stanley Kubrick. It’s a well-known fact that Kubrick put actors and crew through their paces, often shooting dozens of takes for just one scene. It looks like Kubrick was no different when it came to the posters for his iconic horror film, The Shining. Famed designer Saul Bass, who created the original poster for the movie, worked with Kubrick to perfect the artwork. The Fox is Black noted: ”I’ve read online that Kubrick made Bass go through at least 300 versions of the poster until finally ending on the extremely alien looking version we now know.” The greatest parts about the images are the notes Bass (or Stanley?) made and the fish doodle next to Bass’ signature. Take a closer look in our gallery. … Read More

Film

The 30 Best Movie Posters of 2012

By Alison Nastasi on

Before we close another chapter in cinema history, take a look at some of our favorite film posters from 2012. We kept our inner movie critic in check and focused on the retro, minimal, satirical, and striking artwork representing this year’s slate of incredible (and yes, terrible) movies. These designs did what every successful movie poster should: pique our curiosity, grab our attention, invite us to explore the story deeper, and give us great style. Do the best posters of 2012 meet your design-savvy expectations? Check out our selections after the jump. … Read More

Design

Gorgeous Silent Film Posters from Around the World

By Emily Temple on

As you may have noticed, we love a good movie poster here at Flavorpill, so when we spotted these lovely international posters from the silent film era over at 50 Watts, we just had to share. Unlike most film posters nowadays, these feel like art in and of themselves, whether soft and lushly drawn or stark and evocative, perhaps filling in some of the emotional space that we now fill with sound. We don’t know about you, but they sort of make us want to go on a silent film-watching binge at our next opportunity. Click through to see a few of our favorites, and then be sure to head on over to 50 Watts to see the whole collection. … Read More

Design

The Movie Alphabet: An Amazing Series of Typographic Film Posters

By Emily Temple on

As you may have noticed, we’re suckers for awesome interpretations of movie posters and typography in all its forms, so we’re positively tickled by Meagan’s Movie Alphabet, an A-to-Z of movies by artist Meagan Hyland, which we spotted over at Explore. We can’t think of a better way to learn our pop culture alphabet (though we admit a few of these would be slightly out of place on kindergarten class walls). Click through to see some of our favorites from the series, and then head on over to Hyland’s website to see the entire collection unfold, and once the alphabet is complete, to purchase prints for yourself. … Read More

Design

20 Amazing Modern Illustrated Movie Posters

By Emily Temple on

This week, the gorgeous painted poster for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom made the rounds on the internet, getting everyone a little bit more excited for the film’s release. Though the poster isn’t the least bit surprising for a Wes Anderson film, we still thought it was exceptionally lovely, especially for a modern movie poster. Today, most go for flash over beauty, bombarding us with huge celebrity faces, typographic tricks, or slick graphic design. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — there are lots of wonderful posters in that vein. But it’s interesting to note that in the past, almost all movie posters were illustrated by hand, and even as recently as the ’80s, the posters for films like Blade Runner and Raiders of the Lost Ark – the kind of movies that today would warrant more flashy advertisements — sported lovely hand-drawn art. However, the poster for Moonrise Kingdom inspired us to dig up a few more modern movie posters, released over the last few years, that are hand-drawn or illustrated. They’re not all beautiful, exactly, but they’re all refreshing in this age of shiny red text on black backgrounds. … Read More

Film

Beautiful Pre-Code Movie Posters Unconvered in a Pennsylvania Attic

By Jason Bailey on

As you may have noticed, we love old movie posters. There’s something refreshing about the warmth and artistry of vintage film art, particularly when compared to the focus-grouped, Photoshopped, floating-heads nightmares that pass for movie posters today, and that’s why this item from MUBI about “the Berwick discovery” caught our eye. (Yes, it already has a cool-sounding nickname, and it deserves one.)

Here’s the story: 30 or so vintage posters from the “Pre-Code” era (that strangely lenient period of early talking pictures released before the active enforcement of the Motion Picture Code, which stringently censored implications of sexuality, violence, and abject morality) were discovered last fall in an attic in Berwick, Pennsylvania. The posters had been displayed in a local theatre; they had been glued on top of each other as new posters (and films) arrived at the venue, and then the whole stack was — get this—stuffed into the walls of the attic as insulation. And there they remained, until the contents of the house were sold in an estate sale. … Read More