Successful poster campaigns

The film industry is a huge revenue based business, when you look at the figures earned recently from films such as 'Avatar' you've got to realise that there's a lot riding on these movies, therefore they need a successful marketing campaign.


A successful poster campaign for its time I feel was Danny Boyle's Trainspotting by Irving Welsh. I've looked into an interview involving the designers of the poster campaign to see their thoughts behind its success.



CR: The posters for Trainspotting were so unusual when they came out especially the campaign around the characters with one poster introducing each one (I realise there were larger posters with all of them on too). What was your inspiration for this? How did the campaign come about?

Rob O’Connor: Irving Welsh's novel, from which the movie had been adapted, was written from the multiple points of view and in the voices of each of the main characters, and we felt it was important to stress the individuality of those personalities. Only Ewan MacGregor and Robert Carlyle were reasonably well known at this time, so it was quite unusual to take this approach. The characters in the story themselves almost seemed more important than the actors playing the roles.


Mark Blamire: I can remember a few years earlier seeing the individual character posters for the film Reservoir Dogs, designed by Mia Matson at Creative Partnership. It was a really impactful poster campaign at the time. I kind of used this as my challenge to do something which had this power to capture your attention. The Mr Orange poster, by the way, isn’t the reason why we chose orange as the main colour, it's just a happy conicidence.

We had been initially given a still by the film distributors, PolyGram, from the film Backbeat, as a kind of visual guide for creating the Trainspotting poster campaign. But we hated the image and wanted to come up with something better. The film company had approved the idea of the individual shots for a character-based teaser campaign but the main image for the final poster was to be a group shot of the actors in a tight huddle. It wasn’t until we tried to get the actors into the group shots that the friction started. It was at this point that we realised that whilst the characters from the story were in a gang, they were by no means friends who could implicitly trust each other or want to be seen in a tight huddle-style group photo all hugging and being chummy in the manner that was initially planned.


The idea didn’t seem to work, so we took the actors feedback on board and still tried to do the group shot, but got them to shout or fight with each other so they were still in a combined group photo, but it was more aggressive and dangerous. It worked a lot better but it still wasn’t perfect.

 
It was when we moved on to photograph the individual images for the teaser character posters that it all started to really work. The actors on their own in front of the camera really brought the ideas to life. For example, watching Robert Carlyle transmogrify into his Begbie character when the camera started clicking away was quite a thing to behold. When we got back to the studio and sat down with the photoshoot to try to turn it into posters we realised the group shot approach no longer worked.


We were working on the main poster – and struggling – and also the individual character posters, which came together almost instantly, and seemed to be the only solution worthy of presenting to the client. We had also taken a literary device from the Trainspotting book by Irvine Welsh to introduce the numbering system [in the book it originally starts at number 63 which was confusing for the poster so it got changed to #1 though to #5].

RO’C: That’s right, the numbering used throughout the campaign was a nod to the recurring device used by Welsh in the Trainspotting book – Junk Dilemma #63 – and so on.




MB: It was at this stage that we threw away the idea of the group shot and tried to make a combined version of the individual shots to make the main poster using a grid and boxes to contain each character. We introduced the device of a train station departure board (actually inspired by a British airport’s brand identity guidelines from the 70's which used a yellowy orange colour for its cover) and added the caption 'this film is expected to arrive 02:96 –  to continue the theme of the departure board. Also on the early visuals we had used the skull and crossbones dangerous chemical warnings symbol.



But we swapped the yellow for a brighter orange background. This move also paid homage to the original book cover. The film company didn’t like the device and we argued that it needed to be kept, as it conveyed an element of danger in the posters – an argument we eventually lost.




After reading this interview, it has made it pretty apparent that a film poster isn't easy to put together. It needs a lot of thought put into it so it fits in with the idea of the film.