This is the amount of time it takes in a job interview for
the interviewer to make their mind up on whether they’re going to employ you or
not.
Think about it – twelve seconds. If your handshake is too
limp, or your opening 'wotcha' isn’t delivered with the right amount of
panache, or you’ve chosen the wrong Mr Man character for your tie, it’s all over.
Everything else is window dressing. The job owner is just going to be filtering whatever follows into justifying his initial gut feeling.
And it seems highly likely that distributors and sales
agents operate on a similar timescale. Probably less, if anything. They’re not
worried about the quality of the movie as much as they are in whether it’ll fly
off a shelf in Asda.
So, it’s all about the first impressions. I see five days in
a suit in the hot Cannes sunshine in my immediate future. *sigh*.
And this is where the key art is so important. In fact, it's possibly more important than the quality of the actual movie. We need to show distributors and sales agents something awesome and arresting that
resembles a DVD cover. We don’t get twelve seconds of glance time to
work with in a busy supermarket, as our prospective DVD purchaser scans the
array of available titles looking for something mildly diverting for a gory
Saturday night in.
Enter Amo – graphic designer extraordinaire. Using only a
bunch of Rob’s stills from the set, can he sort us out a poster?
Er, yeah… we’re not sure quite what we’re after just yet…
can you, you know, have a think and come up with some ideas? I mean, the Zombie Diaries covers were quite nice,
and clearly worked well enough to shift a bunch of copies of the film. You know…
so like that. But not exactly like that. Please.
Ah – how creative professionals love tight briefs. I think
that’s why most of them see themselves as super-heroes.
Well, whatever we said seems to have paid off. Yesterday,
Amo-the-pictures delivered the final spin of the key art to us, and Jake and I
have been dancing circles around the office ever since. Add a couple of juicy
quotes from some of the more visceral fan-site reactions to the original trailer
and we’re in business. Any DVD that has 'a truly sick zombie flick' on
the cover has already won me over.
I mean, how good does that look? Direct from the deliciously
dark sickness at the heart of the brooding psyche of sweet Amo-the-pictures. You’ve done a man’s work, sir.
Now if there was only a Mr Dead to screen-print onto some
ties we’d be home and dry. Sort it out, Hargreaves. Arrested.
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