At some point in your life, you’ve had a movie poster on the wall of your home. Maybe in your student days when you thought you were the first person to discover the French New Wave you had the Breathless poster on your wall or Star Wars, Top Gun, Pretty Woman? Who knows. As household decor they’re signifiers of your alleged taste, as attention-grabbing billboards they’re advertisements for escapism and, if done well, they can be icons of design. They’re also a fast ticket to nostalgic memories—just like a song can transport you instantly to another time and place, seeing a poster that maybe once sat on the cover of a VHS tape can take you back in time for a few stolen moments.
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Tomasz Opasinski is an artist from Poland who’s designed hundreds of movie posters for Hollywood, utilising his skills with Photoshop to create digital designs in the slick style that the blockbusters demand, so that they lure you into the cinema like a siren issuing its call. His most recent design was for Oblivion, the latest Tom Cruise vehicle about a drone repairman.As well as these more mainstream designs he also creates alternative posters for big Hollywood movies, like Inception, Tron, and The Matrix (see below), that take a stylistic glance back to the more conceptual aesthetic that his Polish forebears were famous for, bringing a more experimental approach to the designs while riffing on the film’s themes and concepts to create intricate and complex layouts.His designs will be on exhibition at the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival in London where he’ll also be giving a masterclass. But we couldn’t wait for that, so we emailed him a few questions to find out about his craft.The Creators Project: Can you briefly talk me through how you went about designing the new Oblivion poster and what influenced its design? Tomasz Opasinski: The “Bridge” poster was built on a simple premise: introducing main characters in a world that is somewhat similar and known, but different and foreign at the same time. I can’t tell you details of the movie itself, but my initial thought about the bridge itself was simple: I can’t show the bridge standing still and straight and I also can’t show the bridge completely destroyed because in both cases it wouldn’t represent the movie in a right way. So I decied to tilt our bridge a bit, like what happens with a flower when it’s lacking water for example, same with the bridge—it’s not dead and not super healthy at the same time.
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Something is “off” and this plays with the sense of place—a scope behind the bridge, the clouds, lighting, and immediate surrounding of Tom Cruise. All this gives you a certain feel, tells you a little of what it is about—teases you in a way. Personally, I like it a lot. It screams, but in a very settled way.
OblivionYour poster for the Kinoteka festival harks back to the Polish movie posters of old. Why were the designs so much more radical than their Hollywood counterparts and what, for you, is their appeal?
It’s tricky—we can’t compare old Polish posters and new posters from Hollywood because they’re decades, miles, and cultures apart. Modern Polish posters aren’t that different from their Hollywood counterparts, except sponsor logos at the bottom. Let’s put it this way: none of those old Polish posters would bring millions of viewers to the theaters because by the time people understand them, the movies will be on iTunes or Netflix and this is the complete opposite of what modern posters are about—bringing masses to the theaters, selling popcorn, and 3D glasses.Don’t get me wrong, those posters I grew up with were way cooler than many dreams that I had, but they simply don’t work in the commercial realm of our time. In galleries, maybe. Maybe. They have tremendous historic value, they reflect tough times in Poland, they reflect a nation’s taste and I admire the people who created the movement. Having said that, their time is long gone. Kinoteka’s poster represents what I like the most: a metaphor, in movie posters. Kids won’t get it but adults should have at least a few memories that can be illustrated in a way this poster connects with classics to erotica in Kinoteka’s main title and should complete the image of this year’s programme.
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TronEveryone remembers a good movie poster, like the original Alien or Jaws ones for example. These are both quite minimal, but what do you think makes for great design?
Metaphor. I love and have promoted the use of metaphor in posters for years now. It doesn’t have to be photorealistic or completely true to the imagery used in the movie but it has to tell us something, intrigue us, catch our imagination. I love it. Over the years I’ve created a few poster design systems to help younger designers to start and understand the process of designing movie posters. And “Metaphor Based Design System” is my favorite. It’s hard to come up with the right metaphor, but it pays handsomely at the end. Also, simple images read faster which is very important in our busy lifestyle: one image, one second, one ticket.What's in your digital toolkit when you're designing a film poster? What are essential tools?
Industry standard is Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. I’m adding to it: Maxon Cinema 4D and Pixologic Zbrush. As far as non-digital tools go: brain is the most used tool of them all. For some…The MatrixCan you name a few current trends that are influencing Hollywood poster design and why you think they've arisen?
I think illustrative quality seems somewhat fresh after all those years of photo or 3D based images. It feels fresh but it can’t be applied to every single movie that comes out.And are there any non-Hollywood trends or poster designs that you admire or respect or feel deserves more recognition?
I would love to see more different formats, like the British quads for example—where you can actually show more and engage with the viewer for 0.003 seconds more :)InceptionKinoteka Polish Film Festival takes place from 7-17 March 2013@stewart23rd
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