Pepe and Lucas - Posters and Postcards

Voila! Bet you didn't see this one comin'! The poster you see directly below is the face of Pepe and Lucas. We put up all of the mockups I created and talked about what we expected out of the poster and what just appealed the most. One of the things I liked most about this poster was how well the title fits in there. When I was designing highly narrative posters, I often drew the characters and just made sure there was space for a title somewhere. Here, the we managed to make the title a large element with plenty of breathing room, but we still have the opportunity to put all of the main characters on display as well as the environment. With everyone looking at each other like something's going to happen and the gazes creating that circular movement around the title, there's a nice air of mystery. I also just liked that we had a camera angle that I don't see often in movie posters.

We also did an alternate poster for festival promotions and giveaways etc. We chose this frame because it catches Pepe in one of those rare moments when he's vulnerable, and it offers a little bit of the world behind him. Our other motivating factor was that we'd used this image in an e-postcard and it always helps to be consistent in your imagery to give peoples memory a little kick.

Below, I've uploaded a couple of the main versions of our promotional mailer.

 Like a polaroid.

 The heavy black gave me the idea to play with the frame design like you might see in some old silent films.

 This is the one we ended up going with. Cropping in helped. So did reducing the contrast, which is the opposite direction I usually go in, but here seemed to helped clarify things.

Pepe and Lucas - Movie Poster Development

One of the last things I did for Pepe and Lucas was design the movie poster. In my mind, that was a pretty quick job. Just create an image that encompassed the heart and soul of the short or create an awesome montage like a Drew Struzan poster. Simple. Like so much of Pepe and Lucas, this was to be yet another learning experience. I took a movie poster class in art school and one of the assignment challenges was to design a poster for Forrest Gump. My teacher told us that he chose this movie because it contained so many genres within it and could be promoted in any number of ways. It was a love story, a war epic, a historical drama, a comedy, a buddy movie, etc.. It had everything. I came to find that the genre blending in our short created much the same challenge. So I set about trying to cover as many possibilities as I could.

 I began setting up a conflict.

 I grabbed a couple frames from the animatic.

 I took inspiration from zany comedy action movie posters like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I spent a lot of time playing with title placement.

 Eventually, I started involving the Magician as a dark, looming presence.

 Even though making money doesn't end up being the real victory, it is what causes the conflict to escalate to epic proportions. I decided very early that I didn't want to reveal the characters' "powers" or hint at a possible friendship or romance. If the twists are what make your story unique, you don't want to ruin the surprise for your audience.

 I eventually moved from just character sketch ideas to more finished color comps utilizing characters from the animatic or from the concept art. Something to get us just that one step closer to a more finished idea.

 I had started investigating poster ideas that just introduced the characters in some kind of a composition without actually alluding to the story or conflict. Just introducing them as appealing characters.

 I found this actually gave a little more mystery and anticipation and really highlighted what we had set out to do -- create an awesome company portfolio piece that demonstrated our studio's capability with a strong emphasis on character design and animation.

 I had just about exhausted all of my ideas at this point, but my co-worker Tony Vasquez suggested focusing on elements other than the faces. The hats and the shoes were all very distinct and were strong symbols for each character.

There's no police presence, even after all the destruction and mayhem, but I liked Tony's suggestion to do a literal character lineup. This may seem like a lot of posters and in fact, I cut out a chunk that were subtle variations on many of these. However, this image is one of only a handful of images that the audience gets to see to convince them to watch our short. Here more than anywhere else, we need to cover all the bases.
I don't make movie posters for our products much at BZ, but this opportunity ended up being very enlightening. It reminded me how less is so often more - less story and less character (or rather, cropping the character for a better composition). I feel like if we'd highlighted the action and the battles, then that's all anyone would have expected, but also all they would have wanted to see as well. Action and effects are so eye catching, and we really wanted an eye catching image that also intrigued the imagination. We needed to entice someone to step into our genre blended world to see what would happen. In my next post I'll show you the final movie poster we created as well as some of the promotional images we created for the film.