Graphic Designer Redesigns a Movie Poster Every Day, for One Year: Scarface, Mulholland Dr., The Graduate, Vertigo, The Life Aquatic and 360 More

No scene in a movie counts for as much as its open­ing, but even before its first frame pass­es through the pro­jec­tor, its poster has already made the real first impres­sion. This remains basi­cal­ly as true in the era of dig­i­tal cin­e­ma as it was when film actu­al­ly passed through pro­jec­tors. But while film­mak­ers only occa­sion­al­ly go back and retool their past works — not that the expe­ri­ence of, say, George Lucas and the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­o­gy vouch­es for the prac­tice — film posters can eas­i­ly under­go any num­ber of revi­sions through the decades. What cinephile graph­ic design­er would­n’t want to take a shot at cre­at­ing a new face for a favorite movie?

Last year, the Syd­ney-based design­er Peter Majarich took shots at 365 of them, cre­at­ing one new poster for an exist­ing movie each and every day. “The feat is a huge under­tak­ing,” writes the Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Diana Shi, “but Majarich’s final prod­ucts nev­er give the impres­sion of last-minute cre­ations; instead, they show off an acute atten­tion to detail and a bold, dig­i­tal-influ­enced style. The inven­tive­ness of each poster reveals how much of a cinephile Majarich real­ly is.” His selec­tions include “a pool of zeit­geist direc­tors, Oscar win­ners, and art-house films with cult fol­low­ings.

A ren­der­ing of De Palma’s Scar­face is a sub­tle assem­bly of white pow­der to stark­ly draw out Al Pacino’s pro­file. While what looks like a body of com­plex cod­ing lan­guage forms the blank-star­ing face of Ali­cia Vikander’s lead in Ex Machi­na.” You can browse all these at A Movie Poster a Day, see them dis­played in sequence in the video above, and buy them on his design com­pa­ny’s site.

Their simul­ta­ne­ous aes­thet­ic and cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences will please design- and film-lovers alike (groups hard­ly sep­a­rate on the Venn dia­gram any­way), and while many con­sti­tute good visu­al gags, the best pro­vide new per­spec­tives on even much-watched favorite movies.

For Wes Ander­son­’s The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­souMajarich depicts the emo­tion­al sub­mer­sion of its sea­far­ing pro­tag­o­nist; for Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go he works only with the title itself imbu­ing the type with the com­bi­na­tion of shock and dread on dis­play in the film; for David Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dri­ve he uses a pink-skied land­scape of the tit­u­lar Los Ange­les road lead­ing off, as Lynch’s work often does, to who knows where. After you’ve seen the first 286, you’ll come upon a selec­tion that will hard­ly sur­prise you: Gary Hus­twit’s Hel­veti­ca.

via Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Design­er Reimag­ines Icon­ic Movie Posters With Min­i­mal­ist Designs: Reser­voir Dogs, The Matrix & More

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

Down­load Vin­tage Film Posters in High-Res: From The Philadel­phia Sto­ry to Attack of the Crab Mon­sters

A Look Inside Mar­tin Scorsese’s Vin­tage Movie Poster Col­lec­tion

The Strange and Won­der­ful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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