Damian’s Feed

The movie poster for my film, Independently Blue, has been through a few incarnations and continues to evolve. In a way, it came about much as the film did itself in stages of inspiration and compromise. One of the most fascinating things about DYI filmmaking is the balance the filmmaker strikes between working alone and collaborating with other people whose specialized talents enhance the project as a whole. At the beginning the greatest challenge to the project of creating a poster and its subsequent graphic web representation was that we had no high resolution stills of the shoot or of the characters. As unbelievable as this may seem in retrospect, there were many days when it was just Everett and me on set with Ben. When we had extra help, many times I was training a younger film student in the art of putting a barn door on a light. We simply had no one to take stills. When I tried to enlarge a still from Standard Resolution video the result an image which looked amateurish and lacked depth and…well resolution.

In my first attempts I used the typewritten font which echoes the themes of the writer in the story and composited the television static with blending modes to give it a screen quality.  The connection between the dream and nightmare world in the film was central to the story, so I placed the image of Joe framed in a vignette lit by the blue screen while  No Face and Anika  are engaged in a struggle in the distance. I liked the melancholy and strange dark mood of the image, but it lacked the strength and energy that I wanted. I began to experiment with some texture effects and also discovered the great font, “Steel Tongs” which was great for creating a very quick billing block. I continued to work on a few fast and dirty incarnations while simultaneously working on a web site, finalizing mixes, and onward.  I approached my longtime collaborator Everett Weng who was in the midst of working on a series of portraits and a sketchbook portfolio, but he agreed to lend a hand. We decided to start from scratch. I went back into the film and pulled many stills. We used our I Disks on MobileMe to transfer images back and forth.  Then we’d meet up and discuss further steps. Everett’s first incarnation was already very different from mine.  Coincidentally the version I was working had the same core idea. Everett’s eye for line and detail came into play as a landscape in shadow began to emerge. However fascinating this new direction was, we both agreed that it felt far from complete. Continued later this week….