logo les belles affiches

Les belles affiches > Round-up artwork > Mad Max Fury Road

Mad Max Fury Road

Read a special story about "the mask of the dictator"

Affiche Mad Max et La Horde © RYSK © Le cercle noir
Mad Max vs. La horde

George Miller (2015), Yannick Dahan & Benjamin Rocher (2009)

Off we go for a round of visual heat. The real movie buffs among you will have noticed just to what point the French version of the Australian Road Warrior copped a feel of another French poster, the very clever La Horde, dating back to 2009. Dahan and Roher, the cinephile duo, throws us a tomahawk drenched in savagery to a point rarely ever seen in Froggy cinema. Crude, cheap, and damn great to blow off steam, this zombie film from around here…. like when you wanna do jackshit, just do it. Noteworthy, Yves Pignon’s strong presence, the nice grandpa Le Kervelec of the comedy-short En Famille in complete contrast to this chav moron stuck in the projects. Technique What is really awesome in our two visuals is their outrageous cartoonish aspect. You won’t hear Jean-Baptiste Andréae argue with this. This artisanal/trashy aspect can be achieved with high pass, overlay, copy filter, and some nice grunge textures. As for the colors ? Saturation overkill. General hue ? Overdo it on purpose. The title ? Something heavy-handed, like Arial black or Impact. And the final touch ? Stick the characters in front of the title, in the foreground, for a perfect illusion. Ta daa!, job’s done. Artwork The two gunmen don’t take themselves seriously and play action/horror Left 4 Dead style on an Xbox 360 with a tad of Walking Dead, the best ever series of the century. So it’s only natural that the designer veers into the territory somewhere between cartoon and video games, where you can express yourself haywild without the constraints of the movie industry. So in a way this looks like a cover of Humanoïdes Associés or DC Comics. Also check out the fabulously designed gun blasts and the work that went into texturing the title. So OK, maybe it’s the same designer, or a buddy of his who didn’t have time... But it’s great, and that counts already for something.

Mad Max vs. Trafic

George Miller (2015), Steven Soderbergh (2000)

Affiche Mad Max et Trafic © RYSK - Bac Films

Yellow and blue, the color of the desert. Oppressive heat and gorgeous sky. Both films really got that pat down and even squeezed in a diagonal line to add a dynamic sense to everything. On the left our vertiginous Mad Max 4 of mastermind George Miller, and on the right, American brainiac Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious Traffic. Two monster directors, each with a encyclopedic filmography under his belt. Quick refresher : George Miller’s Max is on the lookout for gas to go even faster and even further and runs into a whole lotta trouble in the Australian bush. Over at Steven’s, Michael Douglas unravels a drug trafficker network which in one fell swoop implicates his daughter, a corrupt general, a cumbersome administration, an impossible law case, and a pregnant woman. Technique Right, a diagonal is a good way to make you dizzy and to bring movement to your poster. A tilt of a few degrees to the right, and massive use of adjustment layers from blue to yellow, top to bottom. Overlay desert texture with some gravel, sand and dust, saturate your colors to the max, contrast your assorted elements wildly, spice up your title with some distorted grunge texture, balance blur for depth, and finally put slogans and cast in an empty space. Artwork Looks good but doesn’t amount to much... 15 years between the two hotshots. In the meantime, George had done Babe, the piglet and Happy Feet, the penguin. Of course that leaves a trail, and not just good ones. As far as Steven goes, he churns out like 53 films a year at the rhythm of a cruise captain in the Gulf of St Tropez. But these are two talented dudes even if their posters look like they came out of the same shop, what with the oppressive heat of the Aussie outback and cocaine in New Mexico. Contract fulfilled. Cars run you over, the characters get a good smackdown, and the dust settles inside your nose. A glass of water, quick!