Movie Goings On

It has been a ridiculously long time since I have posted anything and I apologize. Sometimes life just gets in the way!

Among the other activities I've been engaged with, I've been doing movie posters for a local movie house called The Grand Cinema. My cartoonist's group, CLAW, was invited to create posters for a late night Saturday event called "Weird Elephant". (I should explain that The Grand uses an elephant in its logo. "Weird Elephant" is, therefore, the designation given to the weekly showing of odd, creepy, cult and obscure film fair that they screen late Saturday night.)

It's a weekly event and the CLAW has definitely risen to the challenge, creating over a dozen original posters in the few months we've been working with The Grand! Anyway, each artist who creates the poster for that week's screening sells copies in the lobby before and sometimes (despite the late hour, after the film. We may not always sell a lot, but we're beginning to get a small following of folks who want to collect them all!

I wanted to display here the posters that I have done so far. We try to divide up the creative duties fairly among our group and because of that, I don't always get the posters I want most, but I have gotten some enjoyable ones. I've been enjoying the exercise so much that I'm tempted to create posters for some of the ones I didn't get assigned or for movies I just really like to sell at conventions.

But back to the point of the blog. I wanted to share the posters that I have created thus far. At the end I will also poster the piece that I did for a different theater called "The Blue Mouse" that started off the whole process! Some of our CLAW members still create posters for their "Friday Night Frights" event! My "Child's Play 2" poster was the only one I did for that venue.

This first poster wasn't for the Weird Elephant showings, but for the annual Harry Potter Marathon, a back to back screening of all 8 films over a 24 hour period! I was tempted to do an elaborate piece with lots of characters, but I just didn't have that much time -- since I don't have a Time-Turner. So I came up with this concept of a divided portrait of the young hero, showing the early Harry on one side of the wand and the older Harry on the other side. A simple and I thought effective way of bridging the 8 film epic!

This poster was a concept that just popped into my head almost fully formed. I didn't want to just do another portrait, so I came up with this representation.

This was one that I had wanted to do as a montage of caricatures of the principal cast, but events and time constraints caused me to back peddle on that idea and come up with another representational concept.

On THIS poster I was determined to do a fun caricature piece! I made it black and white and did the drawing in pencil instead of ink to give it a similar rough feel like the movie itself. I was pretty pleased with the results. It was especially meaningful to me because I had been able to meet Kevin Smith, the director AND Silent Bob himself, a few months earlier!

On this poster I also wanted to do the caricature montage, but it definitely needed to be in color. The deadline for this one was REALLY tight--it was sort of a last minute piece, so I'm not entirely happy with all aspects of it, but it was pretty successful anyway!

This had an even tighter deadline than the previous poster. I created it the day after I finished the Princess Bride piece in fact, although I had sort of worked out the concept for it earlier. I was actually working on this one when the PB poster came up at the last minute! I had never heard of this film and didn't really have any interest in it until I learned that it was a Jordorowski movie! Then I was all on-board! His films are twisted and goofy and bizarre, but amazing and appealing in their own way! Also, he worked with Moebius, H.R. Giger and Dan O'Bannon, so he's cool!

And of course, the poster that started it all. Chucky. I was happy enough with this piece at the time. Now that I have a little more experience with these, I wonder what I might have done differently.

Well, there will hopefully be lots more posters to come. And I will hopefully be sprinkling in a few more of my own, that don't have anything to do with the theater showings. Just movies I love and to which I want to pay a little homage.