[ 126 ] The art of film: Fantasy
No, it’s not a “spot the difference” puzzle – subtle changes of detail can make a big difference in the feel and impact of a movie poster
Drew Struzan Hellboy (2004) The master artist gives us an insight into his thinking behind the initial concepts for the Hellboy poster
This is a small attempt to do something unexpected. It isn’t your typical-looking movie poster, and certainly not your typical hero poster. I’d done a similar design for one of the Shawshank Redemption posters I painted and I thought this would be a nice place to do it again.
he thing about doing comps for movie posters is that, when I first started in the business, a film studio executive would say, “Do me a thumbnail, just a little idea.” Well, I found out very quickly that nobody understands what this means. I started doing them tighter and then I’d get the job because people understood what I was saying. Then other artists got wind of the fact that I was doing tighter comps and so they produced tighter ones, too. So then I had to do them tighter again and pretty soon I was doing colour comps. It got to the point where people were doing finished paintings to
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try to get the job, because things had become so competitive. Late in my career, my comps are very tight. The composition is sound, the idea is sound and I’m thinking ahead to the colouration that I want to support the idea and the whole composition. So I start with black and whites and do as many as appropriate. I’m going to do a number of these to give the movie studio a number of choices, because they didn’t know what to do. Sometimes the studio would have concepts that they’d give to me, and sometimes they’d say, “Here are some of ours, give us some of yours,” but on this particular project all of the concepts were my own. So, I began by drawing blackand-whites of what I was thinking.