THE RUNNERS
Inside the poster creation
THE RUNNERS is another dream film that would have been awesome, if only someone had given us this mid-70’s car chase action film starring some gritty actors like Burt Reynolds, Steve McQueen and Richard Roundtree. Imagine an insane car chase through the streets featuring a 68 charger, a 72 Plymouth Roadrunner and a 73 Mach 1 Mustang, all being chased by a never ending trail of pursuing cops. This could have been 70’s exploitation at it’s best, if only it existed.
I wanted to mock up a poster for this idea, and I wanted it to feature the cars more than anything. First thing I needed to do was find a good background to place the muscle cars and the pursuing cop cars. I found this great image of a bridge, which I thought would be a little more dramatic in the final layout.
​
I had one image of a cop car from front on, which I could duplicate, resize and arrange to get the idea of a large force of cops pursuing the hero cars. I gave all the cop cars some motion blur and added in some color and glow to the patrol car lights.
​
To add a little more depth and action to the shot I added in a layer or two of dust/smoke. I had a dust image that I converted to black and white, followed by a “screen” blend mode to the layer as well as a bit of coloring to match the warmer tones of the rest of the poster so far.
Next up I wanted to add in our hero cars, a Mach 1 Mustang, a 68 Dodge Charger and a 72 PLymouth Roadrunner. My favorite car is the 68 Charger so I wound up putting that front and center and the Mustang and Plymouth filling up the sides.
Because of the size of the poster I needed to also extend the road a bit. Its pretty easy to do this with copying portions of the road you have, resizing and arranging to match the perspective points, then adding in some motion blur to give the whole poster more speed and action. Once you start dropping in your cop cars, dust cloud and hero cars it really starts looking more like a high speed car chase.
I had to add a bit of motion blur on two of the hero cars, mainly because they looked to static without any blur. As you can see in the example below a slight touch of motion blur makes the image seem more realistic and exciting.
Now that the bulk of the poster is complete I still need to add in our stars. In the case of this poster I decided to add in a dream cast of action guys from the era, Burt Reynolds, Steve McQueen, Richard Roundtree and John Saxon – which I think would have made for a great car chase film. To keep with an older style of design I just dropped them into some frame boxes to place into the poster. You didn’t really see a lot of the Photo Face collage style in 70’s era movie posters that you see way too much of in today’s posters.
Once I had the images of my stars I could then start dropping in the usual movie credit text information as well as the title itself. “The Runners” I thought would be a good simple title that gives an idea of a car chase and mysterious plot concepts as to who and what were they running from.
​
I came up with a few different poster concepts that all stuck with in the initial design. I really like some of the more simplified two color posters from the 70s so I went with a couple black and red combos along with the full color designs.
