Lockdown II - Cinema Posters

Yes, I'm back. It's been three months since my last post so not only am I apologising to you for the neglect, I've also got a backlog of stuff to post. So without further ado, here's a very large one to be going on with...

Obviously, there's been a second lockdown in the UK during much of December and that very nice Emily Cook from Doctor Who magazine again took it upon herself to organise a selection of tweet-a-longs for the Whovian community. 

To cut a long story short, I uploaded one of my cinema posters to the lockdown website and next thing I know I'm doing social media ads for all of the tweet-a-long episodes. 

They are (with one or two exceptions) all based on vintage (and not-so-vintage) movies. Some are quite familiar whilst others are on the obscure spectrum. They've really been fun to do and the only real labour was the effort in finding suitable old posters to homage. 

In no particular order, here they are - all 23 of them*. At the end of these, is a list of posters that I paid homage to.

* Yes, I know there weren't 23 tweet-a-longs but I kind of overdid it. All of the Christmas/festive specials are included even though they weren't all selected.

A Christmas Carol – The Muppets' Christmas Carol (1992)

Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways – This Island Earth (1955)

The Christmas Invasion – Invaders from Mars (1953)

Dark Water/Death in Heaven – Original

The Return of Doctor Mysterio – Batman (1966)

Last Christmas – Miracle on 34^th Street (1947)

Resolution – Not of this Earth (1957)

Revolution of the Daleks – Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956)

The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe – The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

The End of Time – El Cid (1961)

The Husbands of River Song – Tobor the Great (1954)

The Next Doctor – Konga (1961)

The Pilot – Fantastic Voyage (1966)

The Runaway Bride – I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)

The Snowmen – Great Expectations (1946)

The Unquiet Dead – Scrooge (1951)

Thin Ice – Wuthering Heights (1949)

The Time of the Doctor – The Time Machine (1960)

Turn Left – Original

Twice Upon A Time – It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

Utopia – Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Voyage of the Damned – The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

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Doctor Who Lockdown Cinema Posters - part two

Here's the rest of the retro cinema posters I did for the Doctor Who Lockdown tweet-a-longs. 

As before, most of them are based on actual posters. You're welcome to guess which films are the inspiration in each case. I tended to go with designs that fitted the episodes rather than the original films themselves. 

The Fires of Pompeii appeared on the back cover of issue 507 of the DWAS's Celestial Toyroom in an anglicised form. The original Italian version is here along with the textless art.

Click here for part one.

I also did a few random original series ones and I'll upload them as a separate post.

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Thunderbirds - The Motion Pictures!

As you can tell from an earlier post, I spent a lot of the first few weeks of lockdown creating cinema posters for the Doctor Who episodes that had been picked out for the mass tweet-a-longs. Haven't check the exact number but I did quite a few - including some classic series ones.

During that time, I felt I needed a break from Doctor Who. Yes, the creative juices were still flowing but I just needed to do something a bit different.

I'd just acquired the blu-ray of the original Thunderbirds TV series and was cherry-picking my favourite episodes. One of the many comments levelled at the show was how much like mini-movies each of fifty minute productions were. Indeed, there are some that even have very similar plots to later movies. So I started doing period film posters for some of them. 

Here they are:

Trapped in the Sky

The poster is based on one for Airport 1975 - the second film in the Airport series. The Fireflash that replaces the jumbo jet of the original is actually some cut-out and flipped artwork from an old Japanese model kit box. I had to 'reverse' the lettering on the side of the fuselage. It wasn't until I'd posted it on Twitter that I realised that the Fireflash lettering wasn't actually on the original aircraft. 

Operation Crashdive

This one is based on the poster for Airport 1977 - the third film in the increasingly desperate Airport series. In that film, a jumbo jet crash-lands in the sea (in the Bermuda Triangle of all places) and sinks to the bottom. The crew and passengers survive as the plane remains airtight. It's almost the same scenario as the episode 'Operation Crashdive'. So the choice of film/poster was a no-brainer. The artwork on the original is iconic and I had fun recreating it in photoshop. In this case, finding an image of Fireflash that was the same angle as the original sunken aircraft was difficult. There are very few promo images of it from the original series and I couldn't screengrab an image of it from the blu-ray as I didn't own a blu-ray drive. Instead I found a photo of the original Japanese Fireflash model kit. A few tweaks here and there and it looked okay - especially darkened and tinted blue/green. I think this is probably my favourite of the four posters.


City of Fire

This one was another obvious choice. No prizes for spotting the iconic poster for The Towering Inferno. I needed an image of the burning Thompson Towers (no relation). Again there were no suitable production stills so I had to create it in Photoshop. Luckily, the building is a simple skyscraper and building it in PS was comparatively straightforward. I distorted it and surrounded it with plenty of fire and smoke. It surprised me that it looked pretty authentic looking if a little stylised. The head shots of the family are simple pics taken off the telly and filtered to look more like artwork. I had a bit of fun with the words on this one. I can't help doing that. Please forgive me! 




The Perils of Penelope

I couldn't get the idea of doing a very sixties one for this Lady Penelope-centric episode. Barbarella was a no-no so I went for the much-maligned 1966 movie Modesty Blaise - a European film based on a British newspaper comic strip about a freelance lady spy. The poster is very sixties and is an art-based collage of images of Blaise - so it was a straight-forward task to create a similar design using Lady P - made all the more easier thanks to the fact she wore so many colourful dresses and that there are a lot more production stills of her than there are of Fireflash. I like the look of this one. Very sixties. And it's set off by having an off-white background instead of just plain white. 




Here's some of the textless artwork from the above designs.

And here are the originals:

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Doctor Who Lockdown cinema posters

It all started when the lovely Emily Cook ( @Emily_Rosina ) sent out a tweet suggesting that, under lockdown conditions, wouldn't it be lovely to have a nationwide tweet-a-long to the first episode of Doctor Who (2005) 'Rose' on its fifteenth anniversary. By all accounts the suggestion snowballed into a worldwide trending event for which Russell T Davies himself appeared on Twitter to join in and even supplied a new ending for the episode. 

The tweet-a-longs are now a regular event. Loads of creatives join in with the fun along with many of the cast, writers and producers. 

I did my bit and added a few retro cinema posters to the melee. A few. I say "a few". I've now done ten - one for each episode. I even threw in a few classic series stories too.

Each of these posters is (sometimes loosely) based on ones for old feature films. I'll tell you which at the bottom of this post but in the meantime, see if you can spot them. Some are pretty obscure... 

The designs are based on the following feature film posters:

Dalek - Kronos (1957)

The Eleventh Hour - The Blue Bird (1940)

The Girl in the Fireplace - The Virgin Queen (1955)

Human Nature/The Family of Blood - Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Heaven Sent - Death in Venice (1971)

The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky - Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Planet of the Spiders - Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Remembrance of the Daleks - Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1960)

Rose - Invaders from Mars (1953)

The Stolen Earth/Journey's End - War of the Worlds (1953)

If you've enjoyed these posters, then you can show your appreciation to the artist by buying him a cup of coffee via his Ko-fi account by clicking here. He really does appreciate it and needs constant coffee to keep him awake to produce this tat.

Lockdown Doctor Who Posters

There was a global re-watch of the very first nu-Who episode 'Rose' a week or two back. It followed on from an equally popular one for 'Day of the Doctor'. Loads of folk took part. Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies even joined Twitter to take part. Both of them supplied some new short stories to complement the episodes. The two events even made the BBC news showcasing the diverse fans from around the world - Brazil, Japan, Moscow, Italy, Australia - who joined in with the love.

I did my little bit and produced a cinema poster for 'Rose' in the style of the 1950s sci-fi film 'Invaders from Mars' (like those Supermarionation ones I did a few posts ago). I quite enjoyed doing it. So I did one for 'The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky' based on the famous poster for 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. I've no idea how the two connect up but the end result is quite pretty. 

I might do some more. 

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Carry on Star Wars! (or Ooooo! Look At The Size Of His Death Star!!)

Followers on Twitter will no doubt have seen that I produced some tat for BBC4 over Christmas. One item didn't get used. Although it was funny, it didn't fit for the remit to produce a selection of retro Christmas toys/gifts based on the channel's festive output. 

One of BBC4's major contributions to the Christmas television schedule was a documentary chronicling the British creativity behind the original Star Wars movies. It was thought a good idea to meld the sci-fi franchise with possibly the most successful British movie franchise after James Bond. 

So I did this cinema poster in the vein of those Hammer comedy ones I did a year ago... 

Instead of promoting the documentary's broadcast, it's here instead.