Saul Bass

1. ANCILLARY TASK – SAUL
BASS FILM POSTER
RESEARCH
A2 Media Studies

2. SAUL BASS
Saul Bass was born on May 8th 1920
and died April 25th 1996. He was a
graphic designer and filmmaker, most
commonly known for his design of film
posters and title sequences. During his
40-year career Bass worked for some
of Hollywood's most prominent
filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock,
Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder. One of
his most famous title sequence is the
animated paper cut-out of a heroin
addict's arm for Preminger's The Man
with the Golden Arm.

3. SUCH GOOD FRIENDS
This film poster is extremely effective
but very simplistic. The use of the naked
dismembered legs is very visually
appealing as well as intriguing, it
suggests a possible aspect of the
storyline to the audience but says
nothing definite. The use of the
dismembered legs also link very closely
to my film trailer as a number of
dismembered shots of limbs were used
in my trailer. This could be a possible
route to explore further when creating
my film poster.

4. ANATOMY OF A MURDER
This poster, along with the majority of Saul’s other
film posters, has a very simple background.
However, this poster’s background is slightly
different from the one in the previous slide as it
appears to have a very slight mosaic theme to it.
The way the two blocks of colour are positioned
slightly of line and the red one has a rough edge
create an arty feel. It also links well with the idea of
murder, that something isn’t fitting together. The
use of orange and red works very well also, due to
their connotations of blood, danger and anger.
Despite my film trailer not including murder I can
take from this poster in that all the separate parts
need to work together to create one whole image
over all. I will do this by looking deeply into the
connotations of things, the positioning/layout and
the typography.

5. SAINT JOAN
This poster is extremely clever and it is clear that
Saul had a limitless imagination and could create
great imagery to represent the films stories. The
clever imagery of the broken man and cross
suggests an interesting insight to the storyline.
Just like the last poster I looked at, but this one
more so, there is a mosaic theme going on. The
use of textured, multi coloured titles creates a
perfect background, thought-provoking yet not
distracting from the main image. The use of the
white typography makes the title very clear and
easy to read which is always key in a film poster.