My Angelina Jolie Salt Movie Poster

I love to design my own movie posters and when the occasion comes about I like to design them before the actual studio movie poster comes out. So when I ran across some on set photos of Angelina Jolie filming her latest movie, Salt, I had to design something.

Salt is a Sony pictures movie where Evelyn Salt, played by Angelina Jolie is a CIA officer. She gets accused of being a Russian sleeper spy so she must go on the run to prove she's a patriot. Basically it's Bourne but with a hot chick.

What gave me the idea to do the poster was the photo in the first design. She's in a crowd and confronted by a police officer, the law. It's an interesting moment because it ponders the question of what to do, fight or flee and sets up the tone for the whole movie? Next I wanted to tie in the patriotism, be it US or Russian so I used blue tones with red stars. The hardest thing I dealt with was the font. I'm still not happy with it, but after playing with twenty versions I realized I shouldn't be crazy and play it straight. Spy film posters always play it straight and it's never anything cool. Usually some standard serif or san-serif to tie into politics which annoys me. I tried doing the opposite but in the end it looked either too grungy, too fancy, to retro or too modern.

The second poster was a design I made after I was annoyed by the type from the first. I just blindly designed using another photo and the experiment turned out to be very speedy and in the end a little dull.

Designing a movie poster like this made me realize what other designers have to deal with when they make these posters for real. In some cases they can actually concept an idea and art direct it. Or they either get some shots of the actors doing a few different positions on a white backdrop. Then there's the lowest tier and that's when they get nothing and they have to take shots directly from the film itself which usually looks like crap. In any case it has to be hard to just get the assets. Then to design something different that isn't just a big head is even harder to imagine.

Anyway, it was fun to try something different and if anybody has some feedback I'd love to hear what you have to say.