Since then we’ve had many a chat about the short and the script. We’ve had lots of tea-fuelled meetings, breaking down the script, the characters, the plot… everything including the title went under John’s single-finger ninja typing technique for a re-write and now the latest draft is finished. I think this is number 8? He’s some man for the typing!

It’s still a while before anything actually happens but I think this is the best time to start blogging about ‘Swerve’… even though I’m not really going to say anything about it.

It would be really nice if it looked anything like these:

The ideas and inspiration are flowing, I made the most of the Christmas holidays to get actors Peter McGann, Stephen Colfer and John Doran in to the studio when they came home over the festivities, shooting each of them for new separate poster ideas.

One is about 90% complete already, the second is at about 50% and the third has yet to be started as I’m still building the blueprint in my head. I think the idea is great and the shots are perfect for the tone, I just need to figure out the background and then shoot all the elements of it.

Now that the overall idea & style of the fake movie posters has been established and seen by people, I’m hoping to broaden the ideas and do some more conceptual style posters too, take in more ambitious genres and really build on my photoshop/design skills in 2012. I’ve also had a lot of people offering themselves up for poster shoots which is awesome.

Keep watching this space!

NOW SHOWING: Jail Bait

Starring: Aoibhín Murphy, Alexandra Christle and Ruth Phelan.

Plot: A teen movie with sexy consequences. Directed by Angela Barrett.

Rating: OMG

This is your last chance to catch ‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘, it comes to a close in the Watergate Theatre tomorrow.

About The Poster

Jail Bait was the last poster I shot and completed for the exhibition, it took a bit more organisation than the others as I didn’t really know a suitable cast for a sexy teen movie type poster so I asked Angela Barrett to help me with the shoot.

She talked to the girls, explained the idea and arranged for them to come in to the studio, she even came to the shoot to help direct the girls, that’s why she’s the only director credited in the exhibition. Thanks Angela!

Shoot-wise it was the only poster that I tried to get full-length shots of the characters. Given my limited lighting set-up and space with the green screen it proves very tricky to get a proper key when you get to the feet. There’s a lot of shadows and issues. I ended up having a lot of green spill on their shoes and lower legs, I used a couple of different techniques to get rid of it but the easiest one was to simply cover it all with a big colourful glow around the title.

Design-wise I wanted the poster to be very colourful, I think it’s my favourite colour-wise. I played around with different background colour schemes for about a week before I settled on this one, looking at some of the rejects now, they’re hidious!

The title for the movie is pretty explanatory if you look at it for a while but it did originally have a tag-line to really reinforce the idea, I showed the poster to several people before going to print and the reaction was always the same; “you can’t put that on a poster!”. I eventually gave in to the fear of it being too controversial which would have taken from all of the posters so pulled it before going to print. It was pretty bad!

This is your last chance to catch ‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘, it comes to a close in the Watergate Theatre tomorrow.

NOW SHOWING: Sketch Five-O

Starring: John Morton and Ken McGuire

Plot: The buddiest most action-packed buddy-cop action movie of all time!

Rating: Shite

‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘ is now showing in the Watergate Theatre. Monday to Saturday. 10am to 6pm until January 13th 2012. Admission is FREE.

About The Poster

And so we come to Sketch Five-O. It’s a combination of so many ideas that I don’t know where to start talking about it. The idea has been in my head for years, taking various shapes and forms in script ideas for a short film that would simply be the buddiest most action-packed buddy cop movie of all time! Taking inspiration from films like Hot Fuzz, Lethal Weapon and Tango & Cash.

In my head the cast has also featured many different faces, but when it came to the poster it had to be John Morton and Ken McGuire putting on the uniforms. I think without a doubt the number 1 comment I hear about this poster is how much Ken looks like a guard! And it’s also hilarious how people never recognize a black-haired angry John Morton (he’s clearly not a Goth!).

I shot the lads within a a couple of days of each other, having got my hands on a Garda uniform thanks to Alan Slattery in Mycrofilms. I told John & Ken each the basic idea, gave them the uniform and let them do the rest. In my head, Ken’s the “by-the-book” higher ranking one and John’s the dog-biscuit-eating wild one of the duo.

The shoots were fun. It’s not every day you get to be a guard and the lads made the most of it. I played around with lighting and colour balances to make sure I’d have an easy job separating the high-vis jacket from the green screen and this is the first poster where I really start trying to add some atmosphere to the background. The photos of the town hall and Kilkenny Castle were taken on a lovely sunny day, if you look closly between the two lads you’ll spot a dude strolling around enjoying the sun. I didn’t spot that fecker until I saw the A0 size print! I added a cloudy sky, some fog and rain and then gave the whole poster a colour tone to match it all up.

This was also the first poster where I realised the power of the blurb! Those extra little sentences can really help set the tone and idea of the movie. They let me say that little bit more in one way or another. It’s the blurbiest poster so far!

‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘ is now showing in the Watergate Theatre. Monday to Saturday. 10am to 6pm until January 13th 2012. Admission is FREE.

NOW SHOWING: Dawn Of The Chavs

Starring: Thomas Flood

Plot: When there’s no more room in hell the chavs will walk the Earth.

Rating: Awesome

‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘ is now showing in the Watergate Theatre. Monday to Saturday. 10am to 6pm until January 13th 2012. Admission is FREE.

About The Poster

As soon as I decided on doing the fake movie poster exhibition, I knew there was going to have to be at least one zombie movie poster in there. Dawn Of The Chavs is an idea I’ve had for a short film for a long time, it’s obviously a spoof of Dawn Of The Dead and the idea is pretty much the same only instead of zombies they’re chavs.

This poster was one of the first posters ideas I put together, although it wasn’t originally intended for the exhibition, it was more of a practice exercise to figure out how to make images appear through text like in a lot of teaser posters. Thomas came in to the studio one day for a chat about all things photography and while he was there I asked him to make some faces for me. I then put the teaser poster together in rough form and moved on to the idea I had for the main poster.

After several attempts to shoot the main poster failed because the actor didn’t show up for the shoots I went back to the teaser poster and finished it off. The idea for the main poster is still burning a hole in my head, I’m going to do a bit of recasting and hopefully I’ll be able to shoot it then.

This is the only poster that doesn’t feature a Kilkenny location so I simply used black and amber for my colour scheme instead. It’s not cheating because I make up the rules as I go along!?

‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘ is now showing in the Watergate Theatre. Monday to Saturday. 10am to 6pm until January 13th 2012. Admission is FREE.

The shoot was fun, a good catch-up manchat and he schooled me about a character he’s created.  So I’m going to do a poster based on the character. I’ve got a rough concept but one thing is for sure… it will have a baseball bat in it!

NOW SHOWING: KK Noire

Starring: Brendan Corcoran, Sara Begley, Aoibhín Murphy, Alan Dawson & Thomas Donoghue.

Plot: Judas McNulty (Corcoran) discovers that not everything in life is black and amber.

Rating: Predictable

‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘ is now showing in the Watergate Theatre. Monday to Saturday. 10am to 6pm until January 13th 2012. Admission is FREE.

About The Poster

KK Noire was the second poster I started for the exhibition, although it didn’t get finished until I had shot all of the others and it was originally called something else and the first two design attempts were complete failures.

The concept came from an overdose of films like Miller’s Crossing and Road To Perdition versus those real-life characters around Kilkenny. I knew Brendan Corcoran would make a cool looking gangster character, I pictured him as such when I read a script for a short film by John Morton. So much so that I “borrowed” the character name ‘Judas’ for the poster (sorry John, for stealing your ideas). He’s not the main character in the script, so I wanted the fake poster to be a sort of prequel, one that tells the story of how Judas became who he is in that film. I did add the name ‘McNulty’ to round it out and make him like those real characters around the town, they always have a full name, and it always sounds made up. That was the idea anyway, that and a very vague mystery!

Brendan was very interested in the project, he found the idea fascinating and was easily the most prepared actor when it came to the shoot. He arrived in costume with a bag full of props and a head full of ideas to add to mine. We shot them all; from Morgan Freeman style poses to creating fake moments to show fake scenes in the fake film. I then got to work on two failed attempts and when I couldn’t get it right, I moved on to the next poster leaving this to edit in my brain for a while first, slowly picking up the extra elements along the way.

The skyline shot of Kilkenny came from my balcony, it’s an awesome view and it’s one of the only ways to see the old MacDonagh train station, which is blocked off from ground level. The shot of Sara Begley was taken from the same shoot I got the shots of Gemma & Sarah from, for the Butterslip Mile poster. The shot of Aoibhínn Murphy was an alternative shot taken during a shoot for another poster (coming soon). The shots of Alan Dawson and Thomas Donoghue were taken when the lads called in to the studio to do some tests for a music video concept.

After a few weeks of thinking about it, a title change plus a suitable tag-line/really bad pun, a new layout idea and a few hours of figuring out how to make it all do what I wanted… the poster came together.

‘Coming Soon: An Exhibition Of Fake Movie Posters‘ is now showing in the Watergate Theatre. Monday to Saturday. 10am to 6pm until January 13th 2012. Admission is FREE.