Commissioned by Senatorfilm we developed the movie billboard for "Peas at 5:30" by Lars Büchel with Fritzi Haberlandt and Hilmir Snær Gudnason in the leading roles. A movie billboard is the central marketing tool for a movie. The challenge in creating one is to filter through a number of still images to find a key visual. Then it needs to be enhanced through composition, retouching, and concentration until it is all boiled down to a concept that can truly represent the movie.

At that point in time, the customer was still new to us. So in order to get a good feel for the customer we developed a series of potential approaches based on the summary of the story and digitalized stills and presented them to the customer.

Some of the drafts show a series of dots. They’re not randomly used in the image. These dots actually depict the movie title using the words in Braille.

As the full-scale billboard draft design was being created, the font surveys, which appeared to be independent of all other development processes, were on the agenda. We initiated and closely assisted the customer during this process of coordination.

Searching for a key visual involves rifling through the still image material together with the director, production studio and distributor. The stills are used in a battery of surveys as prototypes. To remain effective during the development stage, versions were produced simultaneously using the white space in different ways and were checked for their suitability. Both surveys shown here attempt to create the right effect at a distance using the right graphics to produce a clear composition.