The Dark Knight Revisited (and reworked)

Three years ago today, the highly anticipated sequel to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins hit American theaters. The Dark Knight, which proved to be Heath Ledger's last completed role, created quite a sensation in the film industry and around the country. I myself wore face makeup (a rare occasion for those who know me) to the midnight premiere in small town Grand Junction, CO. I ended up seeing the film a total of four times (once in IMAX) through its theatrical run, a feat I've yet to duplicate with any film to this day.
Everything about The Dark Knight was great. Great story (more of a crime saga than a Batman film), great characters and acting, great production values, and a great viral marketing campaign to back it up (see batman.wikibruce.com for more details).

A couple of months ago, in the midst of my senior photography project, I dug up some of the many props and memorabilia I had collected throughout the summer of '08 and created two original 'reworked movie posters' for the film. Both posters were made through completely original photography and design, although I must admit that I borrowed some elements from the actual promotional materials.

Gotham Sky

This was the second of the 'Dark Knight' posters I did. It was definitely time consuming (about 30+ hours of shooting, layering, and blending), but it is one of my personal favorites. The buildings are actually taken from downtown Chicago (where production of the film took place). By a stroke of luck, I had been in Chicago visiting some friends last March and had taken a lot of building photos in RAW. Even though I took the photos with my older camera, I was actually able to use a few of the building for the poster.
Each of the cards were individually photographed and adjusted for brightness, contrast, and blurriness (in order to create a sense of depth).
The logo was made entirely in Adobe Illustrator, and then imported into Photoshop where I added some additional effects.


This second poster was actually one of the first ideas I had when I started this project. Even back when the film was first being marketed in mid 2007, there were a lot of ambiguous photographs of Ledger in costume and makeup, such as you see below:

(images are copyright Warner Bros., links are provided by wikibruce)

Taking that approach in mind, I took the coat and gloves of a joker costume I had assembled back in fall of '08 for Halloween, and got my good friend Chris to pose as the Joker in the studio. The result is what you see below:

Mr. J

The joker card and knife are both screen accurate props as seen in the film and used by the Joker in different scenes. Aside from a vignette effect and some slight color correction and sharpening, most of the photographic elements were done in camera. The custom logo is the same one seen in the above poster I did, albiet with a different filter effect.

These poster are, for all intents and purposes, my work, and they continue to bring me joy at the possibilities of what I can do with my camera and computer.

For you other movie buffs out there, the teaser poster for the sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, was released just about a week ago, and it's already got people talking. Kind of interesting to note some of the similar 'bending building' skyline theme between that poster and my 'Gotham Sky' poster...

Hope you enjoy what you see!