Before we get started
Hey everyone,
Chris Parks (AKA Pale Horse) here for Go Media. Today, I’ll be outlining my recent experience working with The Indomina Group, a global entertainment company who produce and distribute movies, television, music and interactive games. Their latest project was a Hong Kong, wire-fu, murder mystery release called “Detective Dee & the Mystery of the Phantom Flame”. Indomina contacted me to create a limited edition poster design to promote the release of the film here in the U.S.
I absolutely love screen-printed, movie posters, as they give artists the chance to create a piece that is far more interesting and collectable than the standard, glossy, big budget designs released to the masses.
Below is a shot of the final, approved artwork that was printed for the release.
Client correspondence
To give you full insight into the project from start to finish, I’ve included the interaction emails with the client and progress shots along the way so you can follow along.
Lauren Fisher – Client
We’ve started a project at Indomina where we release an art/teaser poster for every theatrical release we do.We just finished one for Griff The Invisible that will premiere this week at Comic Con and I need to get started on the next one, which is for Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. It’s an AMAZING film, full of kung-fu awesomeness, high-production values and a stellar cast.I love your work so much and I think you could come up with something awesome based on the imagery from Dee.I’m thinking since it’s teaser art we don’t have to cram a bunch of type on there…the title is a mouthful on its own: “Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame”I’m attaching the official key art here and I’ll send you a link to the trailer after it premieres, which should be in a couple of days! I was hoping to have it finished a month from now to release before the film comes out. What do you think?
I thought it was really cool that even though I didn’t have any previous movie poster pieces in my portfolio, the client saw the potential in my illustrations for this type of work. I didn’t hesitate to jump all over this one!
Along with working out the budget, I responded with some initial questions to get things rolling. When working out project budgets, there are usually several factors I take into consideration. Some of the factors I considered here were: the number of hours I plan to spend on the piece, where the artwork will be used, timeline for completion, getting public credit for the work / adding my logo to the piece, how much I would enjoy working on it and so on. Since my work is pretty detailed and there are 5 characters, dragons, typography and background imagery, I estimated about 26-30 hours of illustration time on this one. I always attempt to at least get paid for the actual hours put into the piece. There is of course, also, time involved for back and forth emails, phone calls, changes, etc. that are hard to estimate. With smaller projects, like limited edition posters, a lot of these extras often get thrown in for free, as the price could potentially become too expensive to make sense for this type of project. To cover your ass, you definitely want to establish early-on in your estimate, what you are providing (eg. concept sketches, number of revisions, final file formats ex.) so that if things get hairy with a needy client, you don’t go broke trying to finish the project.
Note: As a rule, I also take a 50% down payment (wherever possible) to make the project official and add it to my schedule.
Chris Parks – Artist
Count me in! The budget sounds good and will allow me the necessary time to put some of love into the piece and make sure it’s really badass! The month timeline should work fine as well. See below for some initial questions and I’ll send over my official pricing .PDF and 1/2 down payment info to lock you into the schedule to get rockin’ as soon as possible.
- Will the poster be screen-printed or full color?
- If screen-printed, should I stick to a certain # of ink colors
- Can I create custom typography for the title or should we just use the current logotype?
- Will it be a standard 18×24 in. size?
- Do you have a folder of images / characters that I can use for reference? (I found a few on dee.indomina.com, just wondered if there are others to utilize)
- Is it possible to watch the movie before getting started?
Soon after, I received my answers, down payment, still images and a screener DVD to watch the film. The piece was to be an 18×24, 3-4 color screen print and custom typography was a plus.
Starting the design process
I was now ready to start selecting useful reference stills and work up my initial layout. Below are some of the reference images that I decided to work with for the piece.
Reference images
I started in Photoshop to quickly cut and move reference elements around until I liked the overall feel of the layout and got all of the main characters into the design.
Next, I decided to work with the typography and incorporate that into the piece early on. I think a big mistake a lot of illustrators make, is to try and force the type in at the end, rather than planning for it from the beginning.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar