Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

A convincing argument that the Trajan font has somehow come to dominate movie posters of the world.

Also see: Helvetica is the movie font.

Love love love. Paul Rogers’s Name That Movie series. With brilliant simplicity and use of black and white, they are like little movie haikus.

And note how he achieves his blacks here. The drawings themselves are simple line drawings without any blacks; the contrasted areas appear to just be selections in Photoshop, inverted digitally. Deceptively simple, and highly effective.

Paul writes:

I started a series of drawings in my sketchbook, it’s a kind of visual quiz of great movies. Each series is a sequence of six drawings of shots from classic films (in the order they appear on screen.) No portraits of movie stars, just iconic images from the film. When I finish 100 movies, I’ll see about getting them published as a book. A book like this could sell dozens.

I will be first in line to buy such a book.

(via Austin Kleon)

Imagine if movie posters were more like book covers. If poster-designers were free from reams of credits.

Check out Graphic Nothing’s Movie Posters for Minimalists photoset on Flickr.

Though… they could probably even strip the word “by” from the posters as it’s fairly implicit.

via BoingBoing

Browsing this wonderful Movie Title Stills Collection is like traversing a typographical timeline of graphic design. As a bonus, the site is beautifully designed as well.

Here’s a brilliant idea. Dan Meth put together a slideshow to music of all the cartoons that have influenced his work: My Influences. I’m tempted to copy his idea, and I just might, but it would look nearly identical to this one. Looks like Dan and I watched and read a lot of the same things growing up.

Gallery 1988 has posted images from their cult film-inspired art show, Crazy 4 Cult 3D. Shown here: Billy Perkins’s Pulp Fiction piece, and Audrey Pongracz’s Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory piece.

Illustrator Josh Cochran recently posted on his blog sketches and final design for the packaging he did of John Huston’s “Wise Blood” for The Criterion Collection. What I find interesting is the brilliant direction by art director Eric Skillman for Josh to keep things loose. Don’t normally hear that these days.

Scott Pilgrim Volume 5 is out this month. The art keeps getting tighter and slicker – and the story is fun as ever. Though there’s a bit of a twist this time ’round. I’m sure the improvement in brushwork can be at least partly attributed to the influence of Bryan O’Malley’s studiomate (and lifemate), Hope.

What is Scott Pilgrim?

Basically, a celebration of Toronto, video games and manga. If you’re into any of those things you’ll love SP. (No flamez about Toronto, plz. It’s where I’m from).

Oh, and they’re making a film right now.

In Toronto!

More at Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Flickr gallery…

Also…
Scott Pilgrim Volume 4

And with those words, the folks at Weiden + Kennedy went right to work, creating a very curious marketing campaign for Coraline, the stop-motion animated, Henry Selick-directed film produced by Laika and distributed by Focus Features. They certainly had their work cut out for them. I’m thinking that this ugly poster (along with the ABC series of one-sheets featured below it) certainly couldn’t have been anything that W+K concocted. When you compare that garish poster with the one featured above, one has to wonder what’s going on. It looks like to me that W+K took over the campaign from a clueless film promotion team at Focus and then went a more subversive route by sending ‘mystery boxes’ to various bloggers (mentioned previously):

Of course, I’m speculating here. I really don’t know what happened. All I know is that the ad campaign took a decidedly different turn once I learned of those mystery boxes. And the official movie site, too. That was done by W+K as well. Be sure to check this post out, as there’s lots of talented people who worked on the campaign. With a $16.8M (USD) take for the first weekend, I think they succeeded (it wasn’t expected to do more than $10M for a movie like it). See video clips, too.

Also on W+K Portland’s blog: Coraline Premiere. (Look for a shot of the Joe Ranft puppet that has a cameo in the beginning of the film.)

One more thing: Cartoon Brew on the Ranft Bros. in Coraline.

Solace in Cinema offers up a great comparison of shots in the trailer to Frank Miller’s 300 to panels from the original source graphic novel: 300 Comic to Screen Comparison.

See also: Sin City: From Page to Screen for a similar comparison between the film and comic work of Frank Miller’s previous film adapation.

From the looks of things so far, I may like the look of 300 more than Sin City. It’s less cartoonish and “comic-booky”, although it certainly looks no less fantastic — 300 seems to retain the otherworldliness that made Sin City such a rewarding treat to watch.

Recently on Drawn!: 300 Trailer.

This link’s been making the rounds, but if you haven’t seen it, it really is quite great! Someone has created a series of illustrations depicting scenes from popular movies, drawn to look like Russian folk art. Can you figure out all the movies? Some of them certainly have me stumped. Also, if anyone can identify where these come from, and who the artist is, that would be great!

UPDATE:
Mikhail tells us that the creator is Andrey Kuznetsov!

John Langdon, the creator of the gorgeous ambigrams used in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, the precursor to The Da Vinci Code, and the author of Wordplay : The Philosophy, Art, and Science of Ambigrams, now in a revised edition, has a companion website to his own, devoted to an unused opening credit concept he created for Ron Howard’s movie adapatation of The Da Vinci Code: Da Vinci Code Movie Titles. A sample: