Designing The 'Charge' Poster

As we were wrapping up production on the Charge short film, we needed to design a poster. I really wanted to make mock ups with a classic "floating heads" design inside of Blender but I had a problem. The rigs weren't designed with such extreme scaling in mind so the rigs could break and unpleasant artefacts could creep up.

So I came up with a weird workaround. Each element (character or prop) was set up as a collection which I then interacted with (posed) via their own workspace. Then I instanced all of these collections into the main scene. The collection instances could be scaled, moved or rotated anywhere in the scene with ease.

The only downside was that I needed to tweak the pose for each character in a vacuum. But that seemed like a fair trade off in the moment. Thus I mocked up a lot of different versions, to show to the studio and get feedback.

After reviewing all the different versions, one ended up being selected. I went over it to give it overall stronger posing.

This is where our art director Andy Goralczyk took over. He added lighting and effects, rendered all the various elements individually and then assembled them all together to create the final poster.

Each time we create a poster the method can vary depending on the end results that we are aiming for and the various limitations we might bump into. The method of using instanced collections worked well for this project but might not be the best choice in other cases.

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Read more about film posters in this other article, Creating the poster for Wing it! by Rik Schutte.