I was commissioned to design a selection of imagined film posters for inclusion in the book
"The Greatest Movies You'll Never See: Unseen Masterpieces by the World’s Greatest Directors"
by Simon Braund. Published by Aurum Press in the UK (Nov 2013), Empire in Australia (Nov 2013), and by Octopus Books in the US (Feb 2014).
We were asked to visualise poster designs for films that, for a variety of reason, were never actually completed.
My aim was to make the posters look realistic to suit the time period the films were initally due out.
No.1
Poster design for the unmade 1970s James Bond film Warhead
No.2
Poster design for the unmade Wong Kar-Wai film The Lady From Shanghai (2005)
No.3
Poster design for the unmade Ridley Scott sequel Gladiator II (2006)
No.4
Poster design for the unmade Mina Nair film Shantaram (2008) based on the nest selling novel by Gregory David Roberts, of the same name, published in 2003
The book was produced by Quintessence Editions and designed by Alison Hau.
I also designed the jacket for the US edition of the book, here is the final cover:
Producing the visual was a fiddly task as the original film roll image was plain (unexposed), it didn't feature any stills on it, I had to create the artwork from stratch, making it look as realistc as possible:
There was an awful lot of design developments before a final cover was settled upon.
Here are some of my initial jacket cover design ideas for the title:
I was quite set with the typography fairly early on, it was just a question of perfecting it and finding a suitable image to complement it.
The second set of cover design ideas featured a selection of the comissioned imagined film posters included in the book. I wanted the cover to look like a film poster itself, to reflect the subject and content within the book:
Press
An article in The Sunday Times, 30 November 2013, reviewing the book.
It features a selection of the comissined artwork and includes my poster for Gladiator II
Rich Heldenfels, of the Akron Beacon Journal, reviews the new book on newsnet5, and again features a couple of my posters designs, see below
Blurb about the book:
From Hitchcock and Dali to Peckinpah and Lynch, cinema history is littered with masterpieces that have never seen the light of day. Now, The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See unveils the fascinating – and frequently heart-breaking – stories of these projects’ faltering steps from green light to movie graveyard.
Opening at the dawn of contemporary cinema with Charlie Chaplin’s Return from St. Helena, and closing with the collapse of Tony Scott’s Potsdamer Platz, following the director’s suicide in 2012, this riveting compendium of celluloid ‘what ifs’ goes behind the scenes of more than fifty ‘lost’ films to explain exactly why they never made it to the final cut.
Discover the meticulous preparations behind Ray Harryhausen’s War of the Worlds and Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon; learn why Brazzaville, a sequel to Casablanca, and Night Skies, a science-fiction horror story by Steven Spielberg, fell by the wayside; and read about the unrealized dreams of sometimes ill-fated auteurs Tim Burton and the Coen Brothers. The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See details all the obstacles encountered, from unsympathetic studios and preposterous plots to the untimely deaths of stars.
Alongside these compelling tales from development hell are script extracts, storyboards, concept artwork and frames of surviving footage. In addition, all the unmade movies are accompanied by original posters from acclaimed modern designers, including Akiko Stehrenberger (Funny Games, Kiss of the Damned) and Heath Killen (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Never Let Me Go).
An endlessly absorbing alternative history of the silver screen, The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See is an essential read for all true cineastes.
