Sue Daniels @ December 12, 2008

The Coen brothers are famous for their very smart films that spill over with unpredictable characters and teasing plots that always surprise us.
Andrew Percival, who along with his creative team at Mojo House began work on the promoting poster even before the movie finished shooting, worked hard through a quest to find that perfect image.
As start point, Percival and Focus Features had agreed upon a 60’s style piece incorporating a visual depiction of espionage.
Burn After Reading poster design shows the movie’s old-fashioend mixture of comedy and espionage. Now, if you think the simplicity of its graphics and jazzy typography may have been easy to create, think again.
Like all movie posters today, the process of developing this central image is a ‘long one involving multiple design ideas’, Percival. Ideas that are always worked and reworked until that one memorable one-sheet is finally approved.
Andrew Percival shares some background on the process of creating that final one-sheet poster:
…’Because we often start so early on, one of the ironies of what we do is that we rarely get to see the actual film. The visual style and tonality of the film is often a bit of a mystery to us, so more often than not we’re making educated guesses based on the script, the filmmaker, the actors, and the pedigrees of everyone involved.
Unit photography is one of the materials that we are privy to. We’re seldom able to do a photo shoot with the actors, so more and more we’re reliant on the unit photography from someone who’s documented the film as it’s been shot. We receive thousands of photos and have to make some selects.’
Earlier designs had the main actors on the poster but creator designer Percival decided the poster was ‘belying the content of the film, making it seem goofy and too comedic.’ That is when the team came up with the idea of simply big names on the poster. When a the movie industry hits something successfull, viewers want to see more. So this was an ingeniuos idea: ‘Go graphic, go 60’s!’. The 60s idea was very well received by both Percival’s team and Focus Features.
This is the final outcome, a brilliant descriptive design of what the movie is all about.
Movie Posters have become part of our home decorations and are great gifts to give away. One great place on the web to get your movie memorabilia is Inferisonline.com.
Sue Daniels.
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