Dangerous Universe

Reign of Fire Movie Poster

I enjoy creating movie posters of my own before the "official" poster comes out. It's like trying to out guess the designers of the official poster and come up with something better/ different. A few months ago, I created my own version of the "Black Hawk Down" poster with some success. This time I tried my hand at creating a poster for the upcoming movie "Reign of Fire", a movie about the return of dragons in modern times.

I like the official poster (at right) but I don't love the official poster. I think too much of the movie is trying to be conveyed through the poster (dragons destroying the planet in modern times etc.) I think the official poster would work much better if it tried to convery the feelings of the movie rather than the story behind the movie.

 

The poster I created (larger view)
The Official Poster

I had two different ideas for the poster but only executed one of them. With the above idea I wanted to show part of the poster burned away since one of the words in the title is "fire" after all. I took a shot of the evening sky and played around with it a bit, adding some depth to the sky and changing the color of the horizon from pale red to blood red. Interestingly enough I got two birds with one stone. Not only does the large black and red swatch look like a horizon line, it also looks like the burned effect that I originally wanted to go for.

I then took an illustration of a dragon I found on the net and added fire coming from the mouth. Total working time about five hours.

The second idea I had for the poster was to take the "look" of a tapestry from the Middle Ages and change the imagery around to make it more modern (horses become tanks, swords become guns etc.) This would be really fun to do/ illustrate but would take more time to complete than I would be willing to spend. 01/20/02 Updated on 04/21/02

Ancient tapestry