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caspar was recently interviewed by florence scott-anderton, the film editor of the berliner magazine. the interview can be found in the latest issue of the magazine, which will be on newsstands in berlin for the next month.

here are a few excerpts from the interview:

Tell us a bit about yourself; what’s your relationship to cinema?
I was born in London to two English artists, and grew up in a household where making beautiful things was the most important thing. I always wanted to make films, largely because my father took them so seriously. However, we had very little money, so while I was always writing film scripts, my only real outlet for making images of any kind was with computers handed down to me by friends or family. The moment I could get one of those computers on the internet, I did. It was then I discovered I had a knack for website design and decided to start a company.

How does Version Industries fit in the film landscape?
I co-founded the graphic design company Version Industries in 2003 in London. I moved to New York City in 2005 and opened a studio there. Whilst most of the paid work came from real estate brokers and the like, I was always offering our services to filmmakers and musicians whenever I could. Ten years or so later, we were making film posters and film title sequences for filmmakers such as Chloe Zhao, Tim Sutton, Jane Schoenbrun, Trey Edward Shults, Jonas Carpignano, Adam Pendleton, Cathy Yan and so on. In 2017 we also won a pitch to re-design Filmmaker Magazine. I then continued to co-design every issue from cover to cover until 2021. During this time, certain filmmakers realized it was to their advantage to have me on set as a photographer, and it was there that I learned how to make films properly myself. In 2016, after co-directing several music videos and short films with a friend, I finally wrote and directed my own short film. The 25-minute, black-and-white short, Leaving Hope, was shot by Shabier Kirchner (Small Axe, Past Lives) and produced by Rathaus Films. It came out in 2019. That same year I moved to Berlin.

What made you choose to relocate to Berlin?
I had been staying with friends here since 2016, and in doing so it became clear that Berlin is still affordable enough that a significant proportion of the artistic community can and do still live here. I realized that if I was going to stay in New York I’d have to work on more commercial projects or find a different job in order to be able to afford my rent, and that was out of the question.

What do you find unique about Berlin when it comes to cinema?
Thanks to festivals like the Berlinale and Unknown Pleasures and the city’s central position in Europe, Berlin remains an important hub for art filmmakers. Combine this with the German government’s interest in funding film projects — a concept that doesn’t exist where I come from — it makes for a fertile cinematic landscape.

Congratulations on being recently included in the big film poster retrospective exhibition here in Berlin. Looking at the archive, would you say that Berlin has a specific influence on the art of film poster design?
Thank you. My involvement notwithstanding, there really hasn’t been an exhibition of film posters of that stature before, and to that extent Berlin will, I’m sure, be seen as having a great influence on the making of film posters. I don’t think the city itself has had a particularly great influence on how film posters look aesthetically, but Germany as a country certainly has. Beyond the striking graphic qualities of German art movements such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter or the work coming out of the Bauhaus, the film poster-maker Hans Hillmann is arguably the greatest there has been to date. I look at his work regularly, and I say that as someone who rarely looks at film posters during their working process.

a huge thank you to florence for pitching the interview and for the questions. thank you also to the magazine itself for including caspar and our work in it. we’re very happy to have been included within the pages of such a berlin journalistic institution.

update: you can now read the full interview on the berliner website here.

the art library of the staatliche museen zu berlin (state museum in berlin) have just informed us that their forthcoming großes kino (the big screen) show will now also include the poster we made for mareike wegener’s film, echo. we are delighted.

the echo poster will join the act of coming out poster alongside 298 other posters dating back to the year 1900 in a celebration of 120 years of film poster making.

here are some further details, translated into english, about the show:

THE BIG SCREEN — FILM POSTERS OF ALL TIME

Film posters are both advertising and art: they condense a film’s plot into a single concise image and spark curiosity. They translate cinema – and all the emotions it evokes – into graphic design. The exhibition presents 300 original posters from twelve decades – classics, cult films, and arthouse cinema.

PROS AND CELEBS: 26 posters were chosen by film industry experts – hear their voices in the exhibition.

OPENING CREDITS: Graphics meet moving images.

PAULA POPCORN: Follow our mascot to family stations and listen, play, and draw!

CURIOUS? For details about our catalogue, symposium, and events programme, go to smb.museum/kb

An exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

3.11.2023 – 3.3.2024
Tue–Sun 10am–6pm
Tickets 10 € / 5 €, ‹ 18 frei / free smb.museum/tickets

Kulturforum Matthäikirchplatz
10785 Berlin
Tel. +49 30 266 42 4242 service@smb.museum

the show will run through until march of 2024, which means it will be open during the 2024 berlinale. a huge thank you again to christina thompson and christina dembny at kunstbibliothek for finding and acquiring these posters.

see you at the show.

shortly before the cannes film festival last year we were asked to create the title sequence for a film called aftersun. caspar was headed home to england for a bit after having been robbed of his computer and camera in paris, when the email from pastel came in: would we be able to make titles for a film on its way to cannes in just four or five days? caspar picked up a new laptop in london and we asked to see the film. those who have seen the film can imagine what it must have been like to consider whether to work on it or not, even with very little time to do good work. the film is a remarkable thing by any stretch of the imagination, and one that touched caspar particularly for a number of reasons.

caspar sent the director, charlotte wells, some typeface ideas based on the film’s overall mood and his experiences of growing up in the 90s. charlotte picked the typeface—base mono—that you see here:

caspar then began work on customizing and animating the typeface in a fashion that charlotte and he felt appropriate to the tone of the film; dissolving the sharp edges of each letter and making them flicker in and out of focus as if light was coming at us from behind each word; all the while treating it as if our eyes could not quite focus on it because it was too bright. meanwhile caspar’s brother josiah got to work on creating the end crawl, and needless to say we made the deadline. caspar then headed to cannes to see the work on the big screen.

art of the title is a remarkable website run by lola landekić, that’s dedicated to celebrating film title sequence design and animation. in fact here’s director david fincher (se7en, fight club, zodiac, the social network) talking to lola on the subject:

“I love the site. It’s really beautiful. I would much rather have anything and everything about the title sequence be on Art of the Title than in USA Today or any publication like that. Your site is the proper context for this conversation.”

we’ve referenced title sequences in the extensive and beautifully presented art of the title archives many times in our work, and to see that yesterday the aftersun titles were posted to art of the title was incredibly moving, not to mention flattering.

thank you so much to adele romanski, charlotte wells, lola landekić and everyone else at pastel and a24 films. we remain endlessly thankful for these opportunities to work on such beautiful films.

our posters for jane schoenbrun’s debut feature film we’re all going to the world’s fair and alexandra stergiou’s hybrid documentary the act of coming out have been selected by adrian curry to be amongst his 10 best movie posters of 2022. adrian wrote the following text for his mubi notebook column to justify his thinking in this regard:

“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.

our poster for alexandra stergiou’s hybrid documentary, the act of coming out, was selected as MUBI’s movie poster of the week today. to accompany the selection caspar was interviewed by adrian curry about the making of the poster. you can read an excerpt from the interview here:

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.

after 10 years of working to make the best and most original film posters we can for everyone, we wanted to celebrate by opening a print shop at shop.versionindustries.com to provide physical copies of those posters to anyone anywhere.

our mission is simply to make sure those that want these posters can have them and for the cheapest price possible. during the 2020 global pandemic we worked out a way to print posters “on demand” and deliver them worldwide whilst keeping our overheads very low. as you can see, we’re talking around $25 at most for a full-size 27×40 inch US one-sheet or A0 poster on good paper, plus shipping. what small profit margin there may be will hopefully cover the overheads of running an online store of this kind.

we trust that this offers us a way to make sure the films we have worked on can be remembered beyond the festival and theater releases, on the walls of those who really loved them. the funny thing is this is so often not the case; film posters only get printed a handful of times and then they’re just the result of google image searches and that’s that. this goes against the entire point of making posters of course.

thank you in advance for your continued love and support for independent cinema, and for the work that we do to celebrate the films and filmmakers we’re lucky enough to work with.

caspar was recently included in sight & sound magazine’s “100 hidden heroes of cinema” list. here’s what they had to say on the subject:

“Caspar Newbolt is a graphic designer, filmmaker and photographer who co-founded the graphic design company Version Industries in 2003. Best known for its film posters, Version Industries’ designs are simple and striking, often featuring a conceptual conceit such as the smashed piggy bank that adorns the poster for Dead Pigs (Cathy Yan, 2014) or the cascading boxy stills that parachute down the one for Anne at 13,000 Ft. (Kazik Radwanski, 2019).

Two things define Version Industries’ approach. The first is a propensity towards working with independent, outlier filmmakers—some of whom, like Yan or Chloé Zhao, would subsequently become hugely popular—that seems curatorial. The second is a commitment to the art and aesthetics of design, and a resistance towards trend-driven or marketing-led approaches. Both of these choices ensure some degree of obscurity, and yet, many years since its foundation, Version Industries remains sustainable despite still making distinctive designs and still working with smaller filmmakers.

On the company’s blog, Newbolt wrote that “after a while in this business you realize that you need to just let the work speak for itself” and his company’s posters continue to quietly do that. Sometimes success isn’t about shouting the loudest, but about finding those who are willing to listen to what you have to say.

Key films: It Follows (2014), Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), Anne at 13,000 Ft. (2019), Giraffe (2019)

a huge thank you to sight & sound magazine and to matt turner for penning the piece.

the film stage just selected caspar’s poster for sonejuhi sinha’s feature film, stray dolls, as their 4th best poster of 2020. jared mobarek, writing for film stage, had the following to say about the poster:

Caspar Newbolt and (version_industries) take that sense of barrier through line work one step further to create a piece for Stray Dolls like only they can: dark, evocative, and eccentrically off-kilter in an almost discomforting way. Our vision is in constant flux like an optical illusion, shifting back and forth between the woman looking down on the page and the woman on the phone behind it. There’s a sense of before and after … or perhaps lost and found when you bring in the title. The red hue supplies connotations of danger that the cool blues beneath—via depth (the second face) and direction (the text)—contrast less with the promise of safety than the allure of mystery.

thank you jared and everyone at the film stage for this vote of confidence.

2013 marks the 10 year anniversary of the founding of our company, version industries. to celebrate the occasion we threw a party at the cake shop in manhattan, new york. it was a magical affair to say the least, with friends and collaborators flying in from europe and all over the US to be a part of it.

we created a poster and an engraved, acid-burned copper plate to commemorate the occasion. these we gave out to those in attendance. the plate itself of course inspired by the late joy division’s record sleeve for their song,?love will tear us apart.?each plate’s lettering was hammered in by giles and myself personally.?both the concept and the treatment just seemed apt somehow.

the following are some photographs from the night, which consisted of food, drinks, live music, dancing, glowsticks and all manner of other madness. none of which would of course be possible without incredible performances from?SONOIO, makeup and vanity set and BELLS?, and of course the?help of andy boder and all the other fantastic people working at the cake shop.

thank you a million times over to everyone who’s ever asked us to work for them in any capacity. we are only still here because of you and you’ve quite frankly given us a reason to live. not to mention a chance to see some of those ridiculous dreams we had as children realized.

here’s to you.