I love cinema, let me get this out of the way first. From banging Jar Jar’s neighbor to ghost-writing a chapter on screenwriting for video games for the writer of the Steven Segal directorial debut, On Deadly Ground, I have a very close and tight-knit relationship to the world of cinema. As a graphic designer and art director as well, I have a fond love/hate relationship with the production of movie posters.

     Film posters are a strange form of printed art - promotional material to generate hype for a film, they exist as a sort of void in between “authentic piece of artwork” and “selling out.” It’s almost the beginning of the communication of a film between the viewer and a film’s creators - a heads up of what’s to come. The corporate logo of Jurassic Park against a black backdrop, to the magnificent work of art that is the poster for the original The Thing, there’s a wide range of possibility with what can be done to help promote a film in such a limited format.

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I wanna talk about advertising. I wanna talk about the sad fucking state it’s in and how we, as creative professionals, can do better. We all know the twitter mentions, the facebook likes, the social media metrics - don’t amount up to anything. We wrap ourselves in language. Moon language no outsider can understand - CEOs, the everyday joe, the freelancer we brought in. But does it really mean anything?

I like the ideal - good, honest advertising, that’s respectful, that’s an addition and not a distortion on the visual marketplace. In America, and the rest of the world that isn’t Sao Paulo, ads drowned out the public voice. And it’s a totalitarian reminder of who owns the public square.

“He who has the gold, makes the rules”

Yet only a sociopathic monster would find this an acceptable way to run a society. Yet, we all unwittingly consent to it. Bright and flashing advertisting, everywhere. Make It Pop, they tell me. A single phrase, I hear a hundred times at once, in different accents and voices and over and over again. It’s insanity. Everyone clawing over one another for recognition.

I honestly have a hard time feeling as if most in the advertising and marketing world, have a fucking clue what they’re doing. And residual noise of forgettable advertisement after advertisement is all that surrounds us.