‘Hobo With a Shotgun’ poster

I’ve been talking about working on this poster for a couple of months now, and I’m super happy to have been given the green light by the hobo boys to launch it. Here is the Signalnoise poster design for the upcoming film Hobo With a Shotgun. I’ve been waiting close to 3 years to work on this thing, so I was thrilled when Jason and Rob asked me to get rockin’ on it. I have known Jason and Rob for a few years now, meeting them through the comic book crowd here in Halifax. Great guys.

Here’s a bit of back story. I was asked by director Jason Eisener to come up with a logo for “this thing he was making for the SXSW Grindhouse trailer competition” back in 2008. He sent me a cut of the first Hobo trailer and I cracked up at it’s content, awesome cuts and obvious homage to independent action flicks of the 80s. I had very little time, so I put together this logo for him which they liked so much they kept for the theatrical release.

I even designed the logo for The Plague, which will also be appearing in the film. Keep your eyes out for it.

Fast forward, the boys ended up winning the SXSW Grindhouse Trailer competition and started the process of making the full length feature film. Our whole crew lost our minds when we heard Jason managed to slate Rutger Hauer for the lead role, goddamn Roy from Bladerunner! The boys even fought to shoot the whole movie in our hometown of Halifax/Dartmouth. As you can well imagine, we are all mighty proud of these guys for keeping their work home-grown, adequately putting our little city on the film map, shotguns a’blazing.

I worked on this poster for about 2 months. I knew early on that I wanted to do something different from the typical film poster, something painterly like film posters from the ’80s. I started researching guys like Drew Struzan, Bob Peak and Bill Sienkiewicz to get a good idea of the style in my head. I also did a lot of drawing up front because I had no idea how to approach this beast. Did I bite off more then I could chew? Absolutely, but my stubbornness reigned supreme as I wasn’t about to throw in the towel.

What I was aiming for was a weird mix of digital and analog. I didn’t want this poster to look like a “Photoshop painting” with obvious digital brush stokes and smooth edges. It needed to look like I beat the hell out of a canvas yet included computer effects and photographic elements. “Digital, yet not digital. But . . . digital!”. I’m my own worst enemy. My PSD file reached 230 layers at close to 5 gigs as I kept all of my digital paints separate for fear of messing up. Many hours and Photoshop layers later, the final poster emerged. Here’s a detail shot of the digital paints.

Stay tuned as I will be posting some behind-the-scenes images documenting my progress as I worked on this beast.