THE WHEELMAN
Inside the poster creation
THE WHEELMAN is a fictitious film title that highlights some iconic elements of the late 60’s and early 70’s that I would have loved to have seen. Imagine if Steve McQueen gave us this crime thriller complete with a lengthy car chase to rival that of French Connection or the original 1974 Gone in 60 seconds
​
To me, this film would have existed sometime in the mid 70’s, which was a time that gave us some great classic car chase type films. I wanted to feature a classic 1968 Dodge Charger as a prominent character on the poster, simply because I love this car, I also wanted to feature some great co-stars along side McQueen. Around this time it would have been possible to see Lee Marvin as the double-crossing partner and Angie Dickinson as the love interest/ass kicking female lead. I also chose John Frankenheimer to direct this would-be film solely based on the fact that he loved to shoot car chases at actual high speeds which is visually evident in his classics like Gran Prix, French Connection II, 52 Pick-up and Ronin.
​
Here is a spec sheet of the original elements used to create this poster.
I ended up creating several different version to capture what I would like to see in a poster. Some designs focus more on McQueen as the leading man and others focus on more of a multi-cast type film, introducing images of Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Either way I ended up doing a lot of exploration design wise to come up with something I liked.
First off I masked out the Charger and the cop car and desaturated both. I knew I wanted more of a simple two tone print look which is why went with black and white versions of my action cars. I used several versions of the same cop car to build up the idea that a whole group of cars are chasing the Charger. By simply changing the size and rotation slightly you can make the duplicate cars seem less a like to the naked eye.
Once I had all my initial cars and action in place, I then added a halftone filter to all of my black and white images to give it a more vintage print look.
I also wanted to try and add in a bit more character or plot type stuff in the poster design so I added McQueen and Dickinson walking together. I placed this image of them into the picture of Lee Marvin standing in the L.A. river basin. You can’t really see it but it does add a little more story to something that has no story, I never really planned out much of a plot for this fictitious movie poster.
I then added in the usual text and credits to really make it appear like a real movie poster. As usual with my vintage style posters I added in my vintage textures and aging to give it that worn, old poster look. This movie poster mash-up concept is something I am tinkering with a lot. I just am never satisfied with my initial design and I find myself always trying new design ideas. Below you can see the many variations I have gone through to really find one that I like.
