You Need Professionally Designed Key Art to Sell Your Film By Graphic Designer JL Menzel
n my 10 years as a professional graphic designer, I’ve created the faces of businesses, non-profit organizations, events, music albums and indie films. Trust me when I say the face of your film is what will either sell your film or not sell your film, and the face of your film is the key art, your movie poster.
What I’ve also learned in this decade is how under-valued this face is by new filmmakers.
Yes, indie films often are low budget to no budget. We get it. You don’t have the dollars to devote to a pro designer, so you do what you believe is the next best thing. You find an artsy friend who will do it for free, a newbie designer who will do it for an IMDb credit, or perhaps you assume you can open a Word document or Photoshop, paste in some text and photos and voila, you have a movie poster.
“Too many independent filmmakers don’t understand that if your key art is kick-ass, people will buy your movie just based on that. Your potential customer, Joe Consumer, who knows nothing about you or your movie, is generally not going to spend time researching it or you. You must grab their attention in an instant. Bad key art doesn’t do this. Excellent key art does. And once you’ve got their attention, you’re halfway — or more than halfway — to the sale…”
I have been that newbie designer early in my career, I have been that friend, and I’ve seen other friends do it themselves. I have also seen zero movie sales be the final result.
(Read the full post here via FilmCourage.com)
