Creating a movie poster

oops, my bad, yes the fourth one. i somehow never scrolled back up to the first. so, if you go along the track of the first and fourth, you should be headed in the right direction.
 
here,s a poster of my movie that i did in L.A . i'm from montreal so to do all this with 0 money was a big deal. here's the poster. the actor Lewis smith was in it. the movie will have a huge premiere in L.A in FEB go the website and check the poster.

http://www.opiumthemovie.com
 
Prodigi Pictures said:
Earlier in this post I recommended the services of Overnight Prints (www.overnightprints.com) I'm not sure what's happened to this company, but I now deeply regret ever recommending their services.

I've used them for nearly 3 years. I've used them for everything from postcards to party invitations to business cards. However, the quality of both their printing and their customer service has degraded so substantially that I'll never use them again.

Recently, I hired them to print 500 business cards. Here is what happened:
1.) They printed cards arrived on time but the printing quality was a 3 out of 10. The color was terribly inconsistent, the images were 30% darker than the source file, there were scratches and "pressure marks" on about 50 of the cards (which is 10%) and white flecks were scattered randomly throughout the cards.

2.) I contacted them by phone and requested a reprint. The customer service rep was hostile and rude. I asked for a supervisor...he claimed that no managers were working that day (yeah right!) and when I pushed to speak with a supervisor he hung up on me.

3.) I then called back. The next customer service rep was incredibly polite. He agreed to have the items reprinted and overnighted to me. He also offered me a 20% discount on my next order.

4.) Unfortunately, they forgot to overnight the prints. They're rep actually wrote in the email that even though the product was marked for overnight shipping they simply forgot and sent it regular mail.

5.) And, they forgot to check the quality of the prints! At least 10% of all the cards were awful. Now, its nice that 90% were printed correctly (as opposed to the first batch, in which 90% were wrong.) However, this is a REPRINT. They're supposed to be even more careful when reprinting. And one of the customer service reps implied they'd be handchecking this order...its not possible for a human to have missed these kinds of printing errors. Here is what they look like:

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5.) I contacted customer service via email. I explained the above and included the jpg you see above. Their response was to DOWNGRADE my discount..."Oh, we can offer you 15% off your next order." I responded "Hold on, you offered me 20% before the last set of mistakes you made...now you've made MORE mistakes and you're downgrading the discount? What you've done is lose a customer. I don't want your discount. I'll just go to someone else."

I've spent about $1,500.00 with Overnight Prints over the last 3 years. However, something major has changed at that company. I won't ever use them again.
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Is there a print company that you recommend?
 
This is my new one

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The "Who's Your God Now"
Compliments of Rubbersquare
This one was inspired by his "Detox" cover

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-Nate
 
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At the very least you should always have a film camera with interchangeable lenses on set to take stills with. They're important not only for the poster, but also for DVD packaging art.
 
Totally agree. (does it have to be a "film" camera?). Also, make sure whoever is taking the pictures knows what they're doing and what you're looking for. I've given a camera to a production assistant and not a single picture was usable... lots of shots of the craft services food! Ideally the DP might do this, but they're usually way too busy.
Now don't forget (as Prodigi mentioned before), if you have a no-name movie, you probably don't want you're unknown actors be your selling images. That's when you design your poster with an "iconic" image of what the movie is all about. See what I learned from Prodigi... Where is he anyway?
 
he's not coming back.

and, back on track, yes, having a still photographer on set (who knows what he's doing) is a great asset. we had a great photographer on the set of our short and some of his shots ended up being included in the film itself. he also shot the poster image and was the dp for second unit photography (and also for the music video for the theme song). he even shot the promo art for our feature screenplay posted previously.

but film camera? does anyone shoot stills on film anymore?
 
This has been a fantastic read and has helped in many ways. I've used photoshop and am quite pleased with the smaller sized pics, but it's quite eye opening when you have them professionaly enlarged and they aren't done right. I went to staples just to see what it would look like to have glossy images produced for a press kit. Let me just say it looked like unbelievable crap.

As a filmmaker we may fall short in this area for poster creativity and artist design needed for marketing, but the more I'm reading and the more feedback I'm getting this is one of the most crucial areas you're going to need to shine on in the independent market. The film festivals and distributors are FLOODED with product and you need to stand above the rest. Good post! Now I'm going to go back and redo my crap posters. LOL!
 

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Really...You're not kidding us are you Nate?

About poster printing... Our best quality local poster printer is Kinkos/FedEx at about $85 for a 2x3ft. I will occasionally do one at Stapes or Office Max for as low as $15, but nowhere near the quality of of Kinkos / FedEx. That said, most of the time I have to have them do it over 3, 4, and 5 times to get the colors right. ( Also I bring it in on a CD with all the Photoshop parameters correct to begin with!! and it depends who they assign to it)
 
Zak Forsman said:
unfortunately, you don't have nearly enough resolution in that screen grab to blow-up into a full size poster. at a minimum, a theatrical poster should be 27"x40" at 150dpi. ideally the resolution should be 300dpi.

so, in my opinion, the best thing to do would be to re-create the shot and shoot some high-res stills of it.
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Just so you know I am "Image One Pictures" and I was able to produce an outstanding movie poster for my film. It took many revisions but I was able to get the final result I wanted.
 
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