our poster for dea kulumbegashvili’s second feature film, april, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the day today. a massive thank you once again to adrian curry for his continued interest in and support of our work.
(version_industries) and Caspar Newbolt also go the painted route for Family Portrait (limited, June 28), but from a wholly different angle. Rather than create something from scratch, they have gone back in time to reappropriate an old master painting: Joshua Johnson’s The Westwood Children. That canvas becomes the source of these three sets of eyes, cutout and repositioned for the shift from landscape to portrait as their bodies become lost within the void of a highly textured field of muddied color.
It’s a memorable piece that alludes to the film’s disappearance of a character while trying to take a photo of the group. There’s mystery in that absence of form and horror in the fact that these eyes stare at us unperturbed, as though they know what happened and might in fact be the cause. And there’s a symbolic read of Shakespeare’s quote that “the eyes are a window to our soul” included as well. What more do we need to immortalize ourselves than them?
thank you to jared and the film stage for their continued appreciation and support of out work.
posteritatiand the film stage have kindly included our joyland and falcon lake posters in their best movie posters of 2023 lists. the film stage went as far as to consider our poster for saim sadiq’s joyland their number 1 poster of the year.
here’s what jared mobarek at the film stage had to say about the joyland poster:
There’s so much to talk about with (version_industries) and Caspar Newbolt’s Joyland. The ornately hand-drawn floor tiles (their website always generously explains their process) doubling as a window upon the main characters. The whole’s off-center nature pushing everything into the top-left corner to provide room for text on the outside without sterilizing the composition via more symmetry. The way the three actors feel as though they exist in one scene despite a handful of lotus flowers overlapping their images to prove each has been meticulously layered atop the others. The grain, subdued colors, and blood-smeared title. It’s truly a work of art all its own and a testament to the field’s ability to sell itself as much as the product being sold.
a huge thank you to both institutions for their continued support of our work.
the staatliche museen zu berlin (state museum in berlin) wrote and printed a 280 page catalog for their großes kino exhibition. the catalog was beautifully designed by sandstein verlag and it details every aspect of the exhibition. included within its pages is a full page colour reproduction of the poster we made for alexandra stergiou’s short film the act of coming out, and an interview with german graphic designer christiane feneberg, MUBI germany’s director of distribution lysann windisch, and caspar.
the interview, titled “between paper and pixel: film posters today”, was conducted live on zoom by christina thompson, and then later edited for clarity. here are a few excerpts:
CT: In your professions – as designers and distributor – you are dealing with advertising and communicating films on a daily basis. In this, the film poster is only one aspect of many. How important would you say it is in what you do?
CF: The word “poster” is perhaps a little restrictive. 50 years ago, the printed poster may have been the main piece of publicity for a film, but nowadays, the scope is much broader. Contemporary designers create artwork that gets used for many different purposes, from mega prints to small website banners. So what we do is more like a corporate design for the movie than just a poster. Today, everyone is used to getting information visually – images are what attracts us, what makes us stop and think. That means: designers have the most powerful tools to communicate films. I mainly work with distributors in Germany, both creating fresh artwork and adapting existing designs. Hence, I look at the topic more from the marketing side, less from the art side.
LW: At MUBI, we also never talk about the “poster” but about the “key artwork” for a film. The key art is a central element of a campaign: it defines the look by being customised to each communication channel, whether this is a small digital banner or a large scale out of home promotion. As to the ratio, I’d say at least 50% of our communication output is centred around the film’s artwork. The rest of the campaign is built on moving images such as the trailer.
CN: I agree, but things look different from my perspective. I spend much of my time making physical posters for films. Generally, I am approached by film directors who have a powerful emotional attachment to their work. They are less interested in website advertising or such like. What they want is something beautiful to go on their wall, a poetic image that emotionally captures the piece of cinema they have spent years of their life making. For them, the film poster is like an album cover – you know, in the music industry album covers rarely ever change. I will make a film poster for them, but only the poster, as most of the best images cannot just be reformatted to fit any shaped hole.
CT: So the perfect film poster for you is one that remains unaltered?
CN: In a way, yes. The film poster, in its traditional format, has a great power. It is faster than a trailer, faster than reading a review. It captures the film in a glance, and it grabs your attention, whether someone is scrolling on their phone or walking down the street. If you make this glimpse unique and interesting enough, they’ll stop and wonder: why does it look like that? – and perhaps consider seeing the film.
CT: So is the film poster indeed one of the most restrictive fields of graphic design?
CN: Many of my contemporaries in the field are traumatised and underpaid. They are constantly coerced into making their work worse. They spend endless hours diluting the work with pointless revisions, and are left with pieces they’d never willingly put in their portfolio. As a result, they lose trust in themselves and struggle to get the jobs they want– they have effectively become someone else’s photoshop hands. I have fought hard to reverse this situation: I present several ideas to a client as text and reference image only and after some discussion ask them to choose just one. I then make the poster and what I come up with is effectively what we must work with. This way, I am free to produce what I believe to be the greatest possible poster. As a result, I hold myself to a much higher standard than they would or could, and I can really experiment. Plus: I sidestep the suffering.
CF: Occasionally, I have been tortured, too. Having worked with distributors for many years, I understand their needs well. But sometimes it just doesn’t go smoothly.
CN: I have been fired several times by distributors. For me the quality of the work comes first, and the money second. I’m of course not rich, but I can’t sleep at night if I’ve done bad work. They quickly forget that they couldn’t do it without us and it’s only when that understanding is established and respected, really beautiful things can happen. Then there’s a conversation rather than a bullet point list from them of changes to be made, like bullet holes in the work.
CT: Lysann, how does this look from a marketing point of view?
LW: I am speaking from a luxurious position, as MUBI has a whole creative team inhouse to create campaigns. All designers are employed. I hope that our gifted creative director, Pablo Mantin, is not suffering like Caspar and other designers. As a global platform, we work across territories, building international campaigns for our films – quite unlike the situation dealt with by most distributors in Germany or other countries. Ours is a complex process that needs a lot of listening and understanding, because online design and distribution have different needs and expectations. And some filmmakers also have a strong opinion on how a film should be communicated.
CT: The film poster has a long history of being scalded for tastelessness and bad design. Today, too, you often hear it described as generic, unimaginative, formulaic. How much truth is in that?
CN: I’d say for every beautiful poster (whatever we believe that to be) there are around 50 terrible ones, made globally by people trying to very safely market certain kinds of films, be it comedies, horror or action films. We all know the poster types: movie-star heads, guns, 3D shattered typefaces, a backdrop of explosions etcetera. The companies producing them usually have a lot more money to put up their posters all over the world, while the interesting ones don’t tend to have much reach. So the public get the impression that film posters are generally bad – whereas in fact, it is just power by numbers.
CF: It is all about daring to do things differently. Yet the main enemy of design courage is money: if you produce or buy a film, you have to get your investment back – so you play it safe. The assumption is that if a thing has worked once, it can be used as a formula. In briefings, I often get such references. At the end of the day, however, going to the movies is still a special experience. So I remain hopeful that distributors will dare new paths and change the recipe a bit more often.
LW: Yes. Working internationally, I have learned that, to a certain extent, you have to trust people to understand what you want to communicate. Perhaps German distributors don’t do that enough.
CN: I brought a quote which I think sums up a lot of what we were discussing. The Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said in 1984: “Cinema is an unhappy art, because it depends on money. Not only because a film is very expensive, but it is also then marketed like cigarettes. A film is good if it sells well. But if cinema is art, then such an approach is absurd. It would mean that art is only good if it sells well.” With film being such an incredibly expensive art form, it seems understandable that marketing wants to attract everybody – it just cannot afford risks. And that’s where, design-wise, things start to suffer.
CF: Then again, maybe not every not every film poster can be art, or has to be art. It is also simply publicity. People decide for themselves if they want see an arthouse film or a cineplex movie. Is every chain-produced Marvel production a piece of art? Or is it a commercial project? Personally, I consciously chose being a graphic designer, not an independent artist. I believe it is OK that both exists. Big blockbusters don’t have to be ashamed of their commercial artwork, but it’s also very nice and refreshing to have individual, even arty, independent film posters.
CT: To sum up, let’s briefly consider digitalisation. Would you say the printed film poster is dying out?
LW: I wouldn’t say that. We still produce many analogue and haptic things, such as the printed version of our film magazine, the Notebook. This experiments creatively with different designs, adding another layer to campaigns. And for me, thinking about the printed version of a poster is just as important as thinking about a digital version. Nevertheless, we need formats to be adaptable to different communication channels, standardised versions don’t really work.
CN: I regard this hyper-adaptability with some caution. Watching a film on the big screen, you see many more details than you would on your phone, for example. In the same way, a poster tells you so much more than a small display, and it creates different emotions. There’s a value to understanding the different formats and how they work. I am sure that one day, there will be digital screens everywhere. That will also herald animated film posters – which is a whole other dimension. But then I think fondly of vinyl records. Why are they still here? Because people like holding the artwork, they like tactile, haptic things. It’s the same with paper posters.
we’d once again like to thank christina thompson and christina dembny at kunstbibliothek for creating such an extraordinary, in-depth and thought provoking exhibition and catalog. if you have the means, do see the show before it closes march 3rd, 2024. in the meantime you can purchase a copy of the exhibition catalog here.
this year marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of version industries. we never imagined we’d last this long. to mark the occasion it feels fitting that the posters we made for tim sutton’s feature film taurus and alexandra stergiou’s short film the act of coming out have just been acquired by the kunstbibliothek (art library) of the staatliche museen zu berlin (state museum in berlin), germany. we will post a link to their digital record of the acquisitions the moment they appear.
there’s a chance also that one or other of the posters will be featured in their forthcoming großes kino: movie posters from twelve decades show. the show opens november 3rd of this year in berlin. here is what they say about it:
Großes Kino – we’re talking about cinema with a capital C, about motion pictures that leave you feeling overwhelmed or in awe. A good movie poster, too, is designed to be remembered: it captures the film’s mood, alludes to storylines, evokes feelings. The drama and narrative of a long film are condensed into a single image. The exhibition “Großes Kino” presents around 100 original movie posters from the 1900s through to the 2020s from the Kunstbibliothek’s collection of graphic design.
The twist is that the selection is not made by the inhouse curatorial team alone, but in collaboration with thirty people connected with the film industry – including actors, directors, cineasts, historians and designers. In the exhibition, an audio guide with the guest curators’ commentaries will inform visitors about the background to their poster selections. Thematic sections provide additional perspectives on the medium of the movie poster, such as its birth at the turn of the 20th century, Berlin as a city of cinema, and current graphic design trends for films. The exhibition will be accompanied by an education and outreach programme as well as a symposium that examines the topic from a critical perspective.
either way a huge thank you to christina thompson and christina dembny at kunstbibliothek for finding and acquiring these posters. we are greatly honoured to have our work in such a museum’s permanent collection; a collection that includes the work of one of our heroes, hans hillmann.
“The posters in my list this year are those that do what any poster worth its salt should do: they stopped me in my tracks. These days those tracks are less and less likely to be along a city street or even inside the lobby of a multiplex and more likely to be on a virtual stroll (or scroll) through a streaming service or social media feed. The received wisdom is that this will result in a dumbing down of poster design, leading to work that is less complex and easier to take in in a one-inch high thumbnail. In other words, more big heads. But the 30 posters below, most of which I likely saw first on a phone screen, give the lie to that doomsday prediction. They are posters that not only work on first glance but reward repeated viewing. In other words, you could hang them on your wall. One footnote: there are a lot of pairs in this year’s collection, partly because I couldn’t fit all my favorites into a top ten, partly because I love graphic coincidences, and partly because two of a kind is sometimes better than one.”
“Another designer I have interviewed recently is Caspar Newbolt of Version Industries who, as I said back in July, has for the past ten years been stealthily creating some of the most adventurous, expressive, and unusual film posters out there. It was this beautiful and unique poster for the short film The Act of Coming Out that prompted me to contact him, but his deceptively lo-fi design for the online horror movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is also one of the year’s very best, especially in its motion version in which the design comes eerily to life.”
you can read the rest of the article here. a huge thank you again to adrian curry and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.
NOTEBOOK: As with A Confucian Confusion, your poster feels as if you should be able to step back from it and a face will start to appear, but only a very vague sense of a face forms. Is there an actual face in there or is it a multitude of faces mashed together?
NEWBOLT: There is an actual face there but much like standing very close to a large painting by Seurat, when you are close to the poster you end up seeing only a cloud of colors and thus having the vaguest sense of a face or a multitude of faces as a result. That said if you squint your eyes, even close up, you’ll see the face much more clearly.
It will perhaps remind people of that famous scene in John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) where they visit Chicago’s Art Institute and Cameron Frye ends up transfixed in front of Seurat’s painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886). The picture was painted exactly 100 years before the Hughes film came out, and this particular scene in the film hit me very hard when I first saw it.
I am the son of two painters and grew up in museums and art galleries around the world. I knew every word of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by heart by the time I was 14, inspired largely I’m sure by this moment Cameron has with the Seurat. I myself had stared in just such a way at just so many paintings as a kid. I love that in the director’s commentary for the film John Hughes describes Seurat’s pointillistic painting style as being like filmmaking, in that: “You’re very very close to it. You don’t have any idea what you’ve made until you step back from it.” (You can see the scene and hear Hughes’ commentary here.)
It was important to Alexandra and I that, because of the film’s narrative, you could not clearly tell the gender or ethnicity of the person in the poster. The film presents a series of queer and trans actors of various ethnicities exploring what Alexandra describes as “the never ending process of coming out,” and if you look at the LGBTQ flag you can better appreciate the color field we created for the poster. We strove therefore to create an image of a person with a visage comprised of these many shifting colors.
you can read the rest of the interview here. a huge thank you again to adrian curry and to everyone at MUBI for the continued support.
“Caspar Newbolt and (version_industries) traverse an inspired path to give frequent collaborator Tim Sutton’s film Funny Face a printed counterpart. The subject is a revenge-seeking man who serendipitously discovers a plastic mask, donned more as a talisman of confidence than means of anonymity. Was its appearance fate? Has this surreal shield served others before him? Newbolt looks to amplify that potential by delving back through history to discover another artistic work with empowered figures perfectly suited to become this character’s progenitors. His selection of Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist proves a magnificent partner both thematically and tonally. You want to laugh, but it’s all too sinister to risk the ensuing wrath. For all you know, that face might just find you next… already affixed to another’s head.”
thank you jared and everyone at the film stage for this vote of confidence.
“With a wry nod to its star’s name – Machine Gunned Kelly? – Caspar Newbolt avoids the usual grizzled-faces-and-dusty-vistas approach for Tim Sutton’s modern western, opting for something more abstract. As with many on this list, a more conventional poster was also used, but strong visual identities like this are essential for standing out among streaming services’ endless carousels of content.”
a huge thank you to creative review and to mr. benneworth-gray. you can see the poster in question below.
