DIY Movie Poster

So if you do a movie (pretty much) all by yourself, you then have to do a movie poster (pretty much) all by yourself. I don't know nearly enough about Photoshop, but I know enough to be dangerous, so I last month I set out to make something basic. I sent my first effort off to this blog you are reading, and to Darryl Vance, the talented graphics artist in San Francisco who generously spent weeks making the movie's open free of charge.


He then said oh, no doncha worry, he would do the poster. Still though, I have continued to mess with what I began with, and the nature of Photoshop is you just keep piling stuff on untill maybe it gets just too cluttered and you dial back.

The first draft, above, has a lot of stuff Darryl designed just for the 90 second piece that serves both as the slam bam open and complete story of Pat's career. (By telling this whole story briefly up front, it made it less jarring to jump around Pat's timeline later - not to mention jump from radio station to radio station - without confusing the viewer.)


So he had sent me not only the completed open but all the various elements, including the radio tuning dial stick that runs right down the middle, and the 55 -70- 80 AM radio dial representation.


So to make this first draft of the poster, I used this picture of Pat from 1959 w/ him and Jackie Wilson and I believe JB Blayton that is in the film. I had found this crisp 8x10 deep in the archives of the Auburn Avenue Research library.

I did a very high res scan of it, then flipped it so Pat would be on the right side of the poster - better compositionally.


I then did an admittedly very poor matte outline to remove the background, then softened the edges to hide how lazy I am. Then I put a blue wash over the image, as this is sort of tint I did to many of the archive elements throughout the film

For the second draft of the poster I added the names of all the on-camera participants, as if they were movie stars I guess. But only Andrew Young is a widely recognizable name - although H Johnson has been a jazz DJ in Atlanta for many years and folk in the know know of him. Skip Mason is a big wheel at Morehouse College so many people in Atlanta know him too. Then Marsha the writer, Eddie the musician, and Mike the journalist who made some of the earliest radio tapes used in the film.

I then shrunk all the type a little bit, 'cos my ego got the best of me and I figured I might as well give myself a "produced & directed by" credit too. Of course I stretched all the letters super-tall in Hollywood poster tradition, but not so tall they would be completely unreadable - the way Hollywood really does it, as if they are embarrassed to have worked on their own movie.

For the third draft I shrunk all the type some more to show some screen grabs from the movie. One of the festivals I entered was alone in demanding some screen grabs be sent with the entry, and I figured I'd better grab 25 frames just to have them ready for a futer press kit. AS IF this film will actually be released someday, ha... I got Hosea Williams in there, H Johnson, Andy...Then I got a high resolution microphone shot and defocused and dimmed it and put it in the background. Now are we too cluttered? I think it is looking OK.


It will be interesting to see if Darryl goes in a completely different direction. I'll bet he will. Then the nearly zero readers of this blog can vote on their favorites. Ohhh boy!