New Packaging for the Star Trek Communicator!

On a side note did you ever notice Kirk never says “This is Captain Kirk”?  It’s always “This is Kirk” … More proof that Captain Kirk was one chill Captain!

(Wonder if it means anything that Spock always answers “Go ahead Captain”. Personally, I think it’s Spock’s little way of saying “Let’s keep it professional here, buddy!”)

After finishing work on the Ghostbusters Minimates themselves, I set to work on recreating the classic Ghostbusters movie poster as one of our parody posters.

First, I penciled out a rough version of the characters’ poses. I drew Egon, Peter and Ray separately so I would be able to move them around and position them if need be. I also drew the famous ghost logo as it might look as a Minimate for a separate poster mimicking the first teaser poster from the movie.

One of the things that I noticed in the original poster is that Egon’s neck appears to be broken. Try and hold that pose for yourself, with your neck out at that angle. It’s just not right. This was probably something airbrushed after the photography was taken for the poster to get his head out from behind his arm. I decided to reposition him slightly in the Minimates poster so his head could remain attached to his body.

Once I got poses that worked, I scanned the artwork and cleaned up the lines digitally. I prefer to use digital linework since they can easily be sized as large as needed without them becoming fuzzy.

Once the clean versions were completed, I combined all of the characters together and laid out the poster as it would appear for the final product. I then applied flat base colours without any shading using the same colour palette I chose for the Minimates themselves. I also added the name tags (where visible) using the tampo files I created to be printed on the figures themselves.

Afterwards, I went back and began shading the flat colours to give the characters dimension. For the faces, I shaded them as if they were human as opposed to just shading the cylinder Minimate head with a face printed on them. It’s something that was started with posters from the past, but it’s a very good technique to give the characters life.

As I shaded, I tweaked the base colours slightly to make sure they looked proper. One of the other things of note in the original poster is how the three characters are lit differently. The three might have been photographed separately, or perhaps they were arranged differently during the photography. I decided not to light them this way, but lit them similarly instead.

Some additional tweaking was done to background elements, and I brushed in the vortex in the sky above the trio as well. In the end, we decided to combine the logo posters to the character poster to make the third advertising poster from the film.

Finally, I decided to sign my name on the poster closest to Ray Stantz since Dan Akroyd hails from my home city. This is probably the only time I’m work on a home-town celebrity since Lorne Greene from BSG was done prior to my working on Minimates, and we’re probably not working on any Paul Anka Minimates any time soon.

In the end, I’m really happy how this poster turned out. I think it has managed to edge into the lead as my personal favourite of the Minimate posters I’ve been able to work on.