The making of 70's movie posters

[Frank Cox]

Bobby's comments about the It's Alive poster in the Moviepass thread brings up an interesting (to me) question.

How did they design movie posters like that in the 70's? Posters from the really early days all look like they're hand drawn and modern posters (since the 80's or so) look like they're computer generated or at least done using some kind of a photographic(?) process, but what was the procedure during the time in between?

Also in view of your comment about the font used on that poster: How were fonts like that distributed and used at that time? Were they done as a template that you just somehow copied onto your project, or ...? Newspapers used to use metal type in their presses (I remember seeing that done at a newspaper printing office once when I was a kid) but that's just simple type in straight lines and I can't see that process working for an artistic creation like a movie poster.

[Ed Gordon]

In a word, Lithography.

Lithography ... is a method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by German author and actor Alois Senefelder as a cheap method of publishing theatrical works. Lithography can be used to print text or artwork onto paper or other suitable material.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Stone Lithographing was all but gone by the late 1950's. A cheaper competing process that goes back over a century ultimately won out. With Photo Offset printing a master image is created on paper, photographed and used to chemically create metal printing plates.

If you look at a Stone Lithographed poster though a magnifying glass, you will see that the image is made of many little overlapping splotches of various color inks. If you look at a Photo Offset poster though a magnifying glass, you will see the image is made of of many little dots of various color inks.

I am sure there are people here on Film-Tech who can give a more detailed explanation the processes.

[Frank Cox]

Maybe my question isn't worded as clearly as it should be.

I'm not asking about the process of actually printing the image on the paper, but rather about the process for designing and preparing it in the first place.

Movie posters were originally hand drawn (or at least they look like that to me) and then printed on paper for distribution to theatre.

Modern posters are designed using something like Photoshop and then printed on paper for distribution to theatres.

But posters from the 70's don't look hand drawn and they predate the age of computer artwork and desktop publishing, so what did the chap who was designing the poster use at that time?

[Marcel Birgelen]

A lot of them probably were collages of different forms of art, combining multiple techniques into a final product, a bit like newspapers used to be made, by simply cutting and pasting stuff together (by hand, with actual scissors and glue) and then using some kind of offset process to create off-set plates for final printing.

This way, hand drawn art could be combined with actual photographs and printed text using traditional movable type techniques or maybe even a more fancy technique like photo-typesetters. Heck, in the days I've worked for an Apple automation company, we had many customers in the graphics industry. Back then, I knew some people practicing calligraphy at such level, you could barely distinguish it form a print using some kind of typesetting. Those skills have almost become a lost form of art nowadays.

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm not asking about the process of actually printing the image on the paper, but rather about the process for designing and preparing it in the first place.

Prior to computers graphical elements such as titles for things like movie posters had to be built up manually on camera ready art boards. In the 1970's phototypesetting machines were popular for generating lines of type. The technology was developed in the 1940's and improved over the decades. The typefaces were photographic plates that would be manipulated as text was entered into the system. Some machines could magnify the lettering to different sizes.

There was also dry transfer lettering. Letraset, Chartpak and others sold sheets of lettering in various typefaces. You would lift the letters you wanted off the plastic sheet (using a variety of methods) and apply them to the art board. Pretty tedious work.

Some lettering was hand-drawn, painted or even airbrushed, depending on the desired effect.