Insights on Layout and Typography

[Adobe & Creativity] [Coming up next...] [Insights from Jeremy Saunders on Layout & Typography] Welcome back. Thanks for joining us again. It gives me great pleasure to introduce someone I've admired for a long while, and that is Mr. Jeremy Saunders from jeremysaunders.com.au, key artist extraordinaire. Jeremy, welcome to Design for Impact. Key art. Tell us what key art is. Well, key art is more colloquially known as movie posters. But it's called key art because it's the key image that represents the film across all media and increasingly across platform and on almost every level other than poster. Okay, so you're responsible for the image that most people would think of when they think of a movie. Yeah, that's right. It's the key marketing image, hence the name. So, before we get into your work, how did you get into the business? How did you start becoming a key artist? It's quite a long story, but I'll make it as brief as I can. About the end of the 80s, I started a photography degree, and I was quite interested in using photographs as the base for a new image, montage, adding text, which at the time meant I spent most of my day in front of a photocopier. So, you're talking analog photography.>>[Jeremy S.] Yeah. [Michael S.] Lightrooms, chemicals, the whole thing. [Jeremy S.] Prehistoric times. There was a Quantel Paintbox there, but nobody was ever allowed to look at it or wanted to, actually, because it was stupid and who would use a computer to do photography? And 10 years later, after years in the wilderness, somebody gave me a copy of Photoshop 4 and all of a sudden, everything I'd wanted to do a decade earlier was possible and easy, and a light went on above my head and suddenly a whole new career was within my grasp. So, just because of Photoshop? Yeah, just because of Photoshop. I mean, I have said on my website for quite a few years now that it's no small exaggeration to say Adobe saved my life because it led me to a new career that has been really rewarding and really rich. Just recently, one of your posters was named on the web as Movie Poster of the Week, I believe, and got quite a name going there for a while, a lot of noise around it, and that, of course, was Burning Man. Talk us through it. Just briefly, Burning Man is the story of a chef in Bondi in Sydney, and his life is completely falling apart, and during the course of the film we watch him--well, we're trying to unravel why his life is falling apart and watch him try and piece it back together. This is the teaser poster, and doing this was quite a challenge because the brief was to not have any literal burning man and obviously just-->>[Michael S.] Stuck to the brief. Completely ignored it. There are a couple of images that we used for this. It's quite a simple composition. This is a photograph of the actor Matthew Goode. I don't even think he's in character. He's just on a tea break. But the sky is so incredible. It's not Photoshopped at all. It's one of the joys of living in Sydney. That's not the Photoshop filter clouds-- No. I mean, we'll probably come back to this, I'm sure, during the talk, but if you can take a photograph of the real thing, it will beat every single tutorial hands down, other than setting people on fire in real life. We've all wasted a long time, I'm sure, looking for torn paper tutorials in Photoshop, on the Web, when it's a lot easier just to tear a piece of paper and scan it in. The other image that we used was this, which is a car wreck that happens quite early in the film, and as you can see, there's produce everywhere on the street. And because he's a chef, it's a useful metaphor to say that his life is falling apart, and it's a very simple compositing to get those. [Michael S.] So, these were shots supplied to you from the onset photographer. [Jeremy S.] Yeah, there's usually an onset photographer on most film sets most days. Most of them--a lot of them can't afford to have them there all the time, and in those cases, they often ask me to read the script and nominate the days that I think they should be there. [Michael S.] So, you do have some direction over the photography that you want, as opposed to everything just being dumped on you at the end. They ask me. Whether they listen to me or not is another question. With the flames, I'd actually worked on this image before, again, deviating from the brief completely. I had a bit of chance to play around with them. Again, the best way to take images of flames is to take a photograph of a flame. It's nice and easy to-->>[Michael S.] Again, this isn't Photoshop filter effects. No.>>[Michael S.] Fire, distort, blends, smudge tool. No, these are real flames photographed at night, and it's very easy then just to use a screen, layer, blend. Okay, so flames shot on a black background in the Layers panel, blend mode, screen. Done.>>[Michael S.] So, we're in there somewhere. Yeah, you do need to add another layer just to thicken up the opacity of it, just a light yellow brush just to give it a bit of depth. But that combined with a certain amount of color contrast layers and-- And you have to know what flames look like at the-- Yeah, flames are always a certain size in real life, and when you watch those old 1960 stills with the models blowing up, you can always tell they're models because the flames are not big enough. Just whenever you're doing any kind of compositing, just use references from real life all the time, looking and seeing all the time, and that's the final image. There's a bit of color work there as well. Again, done in Photoshop through color work at least? Done in Photoshop, yes. No, there's lots of Photoshop work there. I always use probably half a dozen color correction layers. I'm a big fan of using Gradient Maps set to soft light and overlay and building up color like that. This is actually more of a cross processed effect. Okay. Now, cross processing, that's your analog photography coming in? Yes, that's right.>>[Michael S.] Talk us through cross processing. Cross processing is essentially using the wrong developing fluid for the film so it gives heightened effects. In Photoshop, the Curves layer will do just as well. It's more blue in the highlights and more red, so we reduced the red in the layers. So, we're going to picture this. Curves layer-->>[Jeremy S.] Blue is up. Blue in the highlights.>>[Jeremy S.] The curve is like that. S-curve down in the reds.>>[Jeremy S.] Straight line down. There you go, make notes. You get that-- If I'm wrong, I'm sorry. No, because I looked at your--you often do cross processing. The type on this one, I tried to keep it really minimal because if you've got-- it's quite an arresting image, I think, if I do say so myself, and I wanted to keep the type really very quiet to contrast that because it's not an action film, and just to try and emphasize the more contemplative nature of the film. While we're on type and typography, we'll come back to this later, but your use of fonts and the selecting of fonts-- This is Futura?>>[Jeremy S.] Yep. You'll see a lot of Futura on the-- No Trajan, being a movie poster guy? Not for a long time now. I have been guilty of using it in the past. So, Futura, any other--do you use fonts whenever you feel like it or do you have favorite fonts? I do. I have a very small range of fonts that I like to use whenever I can, and Futura would be one of them. I like Garamond, Adobe Garamond, I should say. And I'm a big fan of Cooper Black, but obviously, only in certain situations. You stick to a refined palette of fonts. I try to, yeah, because you don't want-- It needs to reflect the image, and it can juxtapose against the image, but I don't want it to take over. I'm an image first kind of guy. We'll come back to that. So, you've done a lot of work for a lot of images, and I think both everybody out there online and in here in the audience will recognize some of these posters. Some of them are very confronting, but a movie that was quite big in Australia where Jeremy is from, and the actress was nominated for an Academy Award, was of course Animal Kingdom, and so this was quite a large campaign for you. Talk us through some of the things you had to do for this. [Jeremy S.] I'll always do at least 10 or 15 drafts for most films. You need to explore ideas and rejecting things is at least as important as approving them. The onset photography wasn't the best, and so when it premiered at Sundance, we didn't really have an idea as to how it was going to be marketed, but we needed something right there and then. This just came out of nowhere, and the director said it wasn't right, but it wasn't wrong either, which is as good as you can get. Again, Futura.>>[Michael S.] And I notice you have to put "A Crime Story" in there to-- Yeah, rather than a film about wolves. Yeah, that's a problem. And the story is--quickly--a young boy who is-- his mother dies and he's left to live with his uncles who are bank robbers, and he needs to find his way through this new world and find his place in it, hence, Animal Kingdom. And my gut feeling is always to try and follow the story, so I wanted to focus on James, who is the main character, and no matter how nice the images may be-- Because that's quite an arresting image. It's a marketing device. It's not art. And if Guy Pearce isn't on the poster, nobody will go and see it. That's why you often end up with head shot posters, so people recognize the actor. So, you still are at the mercy of commercial reality in your design. It pays the bills.>>[Michael S.] Right, okay. As I said, we didn't really have the shots, so one evening I got a phone call from the producer who said we can arrange a photo shoot tomorrow in-- I think it's 5 different photo shoots in 4 different countries. Wait a minute. This is--you're having to--alter it, in order to layer a composite, completely separate photo shoots.<<[Jeremy S.] Yeah. Okay, so how do you go about organizing 5 different photographers and telling them what you want? You give them a really quite dodgy looking Poser document, which is something that I just worked out very quickly to show the producer of the film the rough idea of what I wanted. I wanted it to be quite sort of self-consciously posed and to reflect-- I'll stop messing around with that. And to reflect the sort of dramatic nature of the film. It is kind of an operatic film, and so to give the photographers a bit of lighting tips, I sent them a few Caravaggio designs. So, do you use reference a lot when you're briefing-- With photographers, it's really, really helpful, especially if I'm not going to be there, because every photographer wants to impose their own ideas on things because they're creative too. But we have to put a stop to that, obviously. So, then it was a question of just bringing everybody in, and as you'll see as I flick through these quite quickly, the poses change, characters lose their shirts and gain them again. So, these are all Photoshop comps? Different layers reworked? Yeah, every character has their own lighting layers, which are essentially dodging and burning and-- Okay, so not filter, lighting effect? No.>>[Michael S.] Okay, keep going. But color, masks, layers and all that sort of thing. So, actually being aware of how light works in real life and being able to manipulate that into Photoshop. And it's quite tricky. Relighting is quite tricky because obviously, light reflects off the sides of people's faces very differently, and Guy Pearce we couldn't get to a photo shoot, and not having intimate knowledge of the shape of Guy Pearce's head, it's actually a bit hit and miss as to where the--it's a lot of trial and error. But as we went through it, and it was quite a long process, we eventually got to the final key art, which was used all over the world. That's the Italian version, the Hong Kong version.>>[Michael S.] Okay, we have viewers in Hong Kong. And the U.K. version, which is the much preferred shape, which is the quad, just the landscape portrait-like film, so it works very well. [Michael S.] Get a bit more space. But I notice you do still have to--even with that wonderful amount of space-- put a lot of copy there, the style writings, the reviews. Well, this is a good example, as is this one here. With the smaller films, they don't have a large marketing budget, so you have to pull the audience in using reviews and quotes and laurels from film festivals. Not so much the question of make my logo bigger as put in-->>[Michael S.] Throw more on. Throw more on.>>[Jeremy S.] Cover it. This is interesting. Is this is a Photoshop 3-D effect here, or how did you go about it? The original photograph is--that's 4 or 5 different images to make up, and the text was done in InDesign. I just quite enjoy laying it out in InDesign. I find it quite flexible. I exported it then as an EPS and dragged it into Photoshop and then adjusted it using the Transform tools, a bit of perspective, and a lot of distort, and then shadows added to make it feel like it's actually in the world of the poster. Right, if you had to put that much copy in there to make it--okay. You don't want it to obliterate the rest of the image. One of the other images--the one you pointed to here-- very arresting, very confronting, very interesting story about it, I believe. This I broke the golden rule. You have to watch the film, obviously, before you make the poster because it's as much about the tone and the mood of the film rather than necessarily the story or the characters. But the client phoned and said I had to do the poster that afternoon. All right, so 4 hours. How long would you normally have to do a poster? Well, Animal Kingdom, from beginning to end, took about a year, and this took about an hour and a half. I didn't have time to watch the film, which is dreadful, but it's more about the controversy of the film, which had been at Cannes that year and features a scene which we don't need to talk about involving a pair of rusty scissors, and that was what everybody was talking about, so the distributor asked me to make something Polish, by which he meant something metaphorical and he would like to have on his wall, essentially. I don't know whether he wants it on his wall. Obviously no set photography, so what is this made up of? Well, the shot of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg is an onset shot. The scissors are a lovely piece of stock photography. The drip of blood I had in my house, but it's actually coffee tinted, and then I went over the top of it with a pencil drawing just to give it a bit of a rough edge and make it not look like a Saw poster. So, a real pencil drawing. You drew it up, scanned it in. There are some good pencil filters and actions that you can get, but I find doing a little bit of extra pencil drawing over the top just gives it a little bit of freshness and doesn't make it look so mechanical. And Garamond. Adobe Garamond.>>[Michael S.] Garamond is the font. And again, undercutting the sort of violence of the image with some very clean text just to keep it much more balanced. Right, okay. So, here we have, again, a Futura. You obviously are aware of typefaces in and of themselves, how they developed and when they were developed and the historical context, which I believe you used that for this Che movie. Yeah, it's really important whenever you're doing any kind of aspect of design to have a good reason to do something rather than it just looking pretty, like this, for instance. Futura is a very period specific font, and again, the colors I wanted to make--and the sort of slightly chalky feel of this image-- I wanted to make it look like 50s images. You do use appropriate typography for the period or the language of the movie. I think you have to, unless you go completely the other way, and then there needs to be a reason for it. The Drive poster, for instance, has got an amazing piece of title treatment. Well, we've got a couple of minutes left. There was a couple of--this layout. You mentioned you use InDesign. Obviously, this is not necessarily-- Is this hand-drawn, this type? No, that's actually a font, but one of my favorite posters that was never actually used. Why lay it out like that? That's quite a unique way to lay out the title. The word--well, the phrase "mad bastards"-- as you know-- in Australia was actually kind of an affectionate term. But in other countries it probably isn't, and some people would get upset by that, so splitting the word helps diffuse that a little bit, but also, it makes people stop and read, and these days we see more images before breakfast than people 100 years ago saw in their entire lives. Yeah, you've mentioned that before. We need to get people to stop and-->>[Michael S.] Yeah, just repeat that. You say we see more images before breakfast than people 100 years ago saw their entire lives. That's the amount of information-->>[Jeremy S.] Yeah, everything. We just see it all the time on our phones and magazines and stuff. And to cut through that or to just get people to pause for half a minute is all you can do. Sensational stuff. We've got time for just one last thing, which is, of course, you do some hand-drawn typography as well. So, tell us how you draw your typefaces. Well, this is for a short film, so there's a lot of leeway to just go a bit more crazy with that, and literally just drawing on the Wacom tablet and scribbling away until it looks good. For the sequel, Bear, I'd done the titles, and I'd actually scribbled 25 frames a second, fuzzy animation, and forgot to put a piece of paper on the tablet, so I had the word "bear" scrawled on the--etched on my tablet. Well, Jeremy, thank you very much for coming all the way from Coogee Beach, Australia here to across the internet, and thank you for sharing some of that great inspirational talk about design, typography, layouts and Photoshop. Jeremy Saunders, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much Michael. Cheers.