11 January 2010
Black Site: The poster design
Posted by admin under: Black Site; Indiependent Film; post production .
This post will focus on the development of the design and the evolution of our poster for “Black Site.”
I knew from the get go, I didn’t want to do the typical head shots of the key actors. I wanted to go in another direction by focusing on a key element of the film.
When we started cutting the film, one of the images that grab me the most was a shot in the beginning of “Black Site,” where we see a close up of a detainees hands come into focus.
This shot, then cuts to a long shot, where we see the detainee, in an orange jumpsuit, sitting on a metal chair with a black hood on. This image, I felt reinforced the concept and key element of the film.
I then set out to go get a photograph made of this shot for the main poster.
After we finished the color correction with the team from Final Frame NYC, they gave the movie a gray / metallic look through-out, where the only real color that “pops” is the orange color of detainees’ jump suits. This got me thinking, maybe a photograph will not be ideal for this, instead it should be an illustration.
I’ve always loved the minimalist movie posters of sixties films like Hickcock’s “Vertigo” and Preminger’s “Anatomy of a murder” Where, the poster uses a few colors and some basic shapes to create the film’s key elements. This and several concepts from Russian propaganda posters clinched it for me.
I then set out to find somebody who could do that for me and placed an ad on craigslist.org for an illustrator. In the ad, I was very specific and gave several examples to the potential hire for the poster. I found two great recent examples of what I wanted, one was Lee Daniel’s poster for “Precious.” This poster is great, it shows a silhouette of Precious in negative space. The other was an image I found in Facebook in one of the causes I’m a part of. See above:
The artist, Edward, came back with a draft of the image, which is very close to my idea. The image uses four colors to create the detainee; black, orange, white and gray for the arms and head. It took me a few days to figure out a way to remove the gray color, so that the key colors where orange and black. 
Like all my good ideas lately, it came to me in the middle of the night. What if, I make the whole background black on the poster and have one strip of light coming down to illuminate the detainee. This light will be the main color of the film, orange. This lead to the final poster (see below), we used a generic metallic background between the orange color element to make the orange more “dirty.”
I hope this post was helpful any and all comments are welcomed.
On a side note, the film recently played it’s first Human Rights Film festival in KIEV, UKRAINE.
One Comment so far...
Poster Printing Says:
30 January 2010 at 9:02 am.
This is a very troubling poster. With this poster you have captured the serious nature of the film with a design that is far too graphic and at the same time reveals very few details of the film. The use of the black background, although conducive to the expression of the dark theme of the movie, is always a design decision that makes a dramatic statement for poster printing.