Midnight Marauder
The Midnight Marauder is a Los Angeles based designer and art director. He produces the most stunning film posters and Criterion DVD covers – prints soon to be available. His Prometheus series has been doing the rounds, and rightly so.
Once a film is out in the public domain there are many more assets to design with than available for promotion at time of release, as evident in some of the montage designs, but all his pieces show a great eye for composition and tone. More on his tumblr here.
Posted by Luke Tonge on
8 comments
19th Jun 2012
1:29 pm
The Prometheus series is pretty epic!
19th Jun 2012
3:42 pm
I’ve got to be honest – not really feeling/seeing the point of these.
It could be interesting if it was historic/classic movies being designed in a contemporary way or illustrated, but don’t see any value in redesigning recent movies using a collection of screenshots.
19th Jun 2012
3:55 pm
@Jack, Fair enough. I’m not sure if there needs to be a point? I see them as graphic art (for want of a better phrase) – packaging to please the collector not the marketing dept. I definitely see more point in the exercise when the films originally had crap packaging.
“The Criterion Collection is dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest technical quality” which always includes revisiting the packaging – a tempting opportunity for most designers i’d think.
19th Jun 2012
8:59 pm
Stunning images, love the eclectic approach.
20th Jun 2012
3:02 pm
Have to say I agree with Jack, not really feeling it. Some of them are nice but I think it would be better to limit what’s on the site. The first Raging Bull poster’s nice but then it goes into overkill with all the variations. I like the Criterion collection though, hadn’t heard of it before so good to get an introduction to that.
@Luke, surely at the end of the day the marketing department are just trying to please the collector, the Criterion collection’s surely a good example of that.
20th Jun 2012
3:50 pm
@Adrian as much as I’m sure they’d love to only consider the end consumer most marketing dept’s are subject to pressure from execs who will have their own boxes to tick – especially when its a big blockbuster release. I think the Criterion collection enjoys a little more creative freedom as many of those constraints won’t be placed on them.
21st Jun 2012
10:08 am
Lets not confuse graphic art with good old problem solving design, I think the point is he doesn’t have to work to a brief and answer to a marketing dept or anyone else, leaving him free to create work that’s purely for aesthetic pleasure.
I agree some are stronger than others but that’s ok isn’t it, no reason not to include them on his own blog.
29th Jun 2012
6:34 pm
The Kids poster uses the very same kissing image from Soft Metals self titled album. Cropped identically and exactly the same frame. Whats up with that?
http://www.discogs.com/Soft-Metals-Soft-Metals/release/3022918