How Matt Ferguson made movie posters interesting again

I’ve always liked movie posters. I can remember looking at movie posters in the cinema when I was a kid. I’ve always had a thing for quad movie posters.

I was nine or 10 when the Steven Spielberg film Hook came out and I remember liking it. My local Odeon cinema had a big mural of the Hook artwork blown up, and I can remember getting close to it and seeing all of the brush strokes on it. And that was when I had my first thought of, “Oh… somebody painted this.”

As a teenager, I got heavily into video games and taught myself Photoshop and a bit of 3D so that I could start editing and adding to video games, like Quake. That almost turned into a career when I got a job offer from a games studio when I was 17.

There’s been a pushback against the rise of photo manipulation in the 1990s. It can be a great tool, but if done in a lazy way, or in a quick way, you can get boring results. There were a lot of what I would call boring movie posters being produced that would be just a photo of an actor. But then there were artists who started doing their own thing.

The film studios noticed that, and they started hiring people because a piece of artwork online had got a positive response. It’s even more important now with the rise of generative AI, I think, for people to say, “Somebody made this.” So, I’m more than happy to have my name attached to work that I’ve done that’s online.

One poster that I’d like to talk about is the anniversary poster that I did for The Empire Strikes Back. I feel like it was a turning point in my career. And it came at the right time, just when Covid was kicking off and I remember thinking, “This is going to distract me from all of this horrible stuff.”

Because it’s such a classic film, and for a lot of people it’s the number one film of all time, and probably the best Star Wars film, there was this huge, daunting task ahead of me. When there’s a definitive piece of artwork, especially for a film, I don’t rip it off, but I try to evoke it. Especially if I’m doing an old film – like an anniversary poster such as the Star Wars one.

I want to evoke the memories of the films, but also the artwork because, for lots of people that’s their access point for the films, whether it’s the posters or the book covers. I know that with the original Star Wars, I had the book and that was my access point because the film wasn’t available: we didn’t have VHS, we didn’t have streaming.

There were photos in the middle of the book and then there was this amazing artwork on the front cover. They trigger the imagination.

Because Predator Badlands is a new film, it’s a little bit different to working on an anniversary film [poster] where there’s a vast amount of material available online to refer to and you can watch the finished film.

When I was working on Predator: Badlands, the film wasn’t finished. But, because I’m working directly with the studio, they can send me reference material. It’s a back and forth and then once we get a concept that’s good and everyone’s like, “We’re excited about this!” then I’ll take it to final.

There might be tweaks or requests to change this and change that. Tiny things, really.

At one point on my Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith anniversary poster, Anakin Skywalker was almost more a part of the mask. The idea was that it was enveloping him, but then I pulled back and made it a little bit less strange.

It was a bit strange for a while, to be honest. Initially, I used to do lots of silhouettes. It’s easier than drawing somebody. With Indiana Jones it’s easy, because you’ve got his hat and you’re there. Sometimes, for technical reasons, and sometimes because you can’t get the likeness right, and you can’t get the approval of the actors, you’ll decide to just do it as a silhouette.

But then, it’s about how you put that together in an interesting way. Superheroes have a shape to them that work well as silhouettes. I do like using silhouettes!

Another thing that’s different about movie posters now is that old fashioned movie posters were designed to be seen in a cinema foyer and so they were large.

But now, people are seeing posters on their phone, and so I say to artists who I work with: “Make sure you do the standard test: make sure your composition is small, like the size of a business card, because that’s how most people are going to see it.”

Simpler compositions with fewer elements go down well online.

I’m a massive fan of everything that I do. I’ll say no to jobs where I don’t care about it. Star Trek is pretty much my favourite and I like Transformers, too, because of the toys.

The Star Trek films have always been a big thing for me. So doing those is like a passion project, in a way. I love Star Wars, and it’s been a really big and important job for me. People have been so positive about my work on the Star Wars movies, and so I feel a lot of responsibility to make each new one that I do as good as it can be.