Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the results of the Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans poster contest!
I ended up with over 60 entries from all over the world. The contest was only open to US readers, unfortunately, but some non-US residents entered hoping only to have a good enough entry to warrant inclusion in the runner-ups… a couple made the cut and you’ll see them below.
If you don’t remember the rules of the contest… it was simple. I wanted a poster that showed the movie for what it is, not the safe floating heads cop drama standard layout that the studio cooked up.
The flick is crazy entertaining and the posters that caught my eye captured a bit of that spirit.
There was a ton of great entries and that’s not me just buttering up the entrants. Seriously, this one was really difficult to narrow down.
I’m going to show a handful of entries below, some better than others in certain categories, some more professional, some less so, but with a great design element, etc.
To start I’m going to give you the 2nd place and then the winning entry. I went back and forth on these two for a good 36 hours. The near-win was an entry by a reader named Jason Rasco. Rasco’s contrasting of black and red colors is great and the flow of the design is sharp. Check it out:
Good, right? You can see why I had a hard time giving it second place. The winner is Sean Hartter and his poster isn’t as professionally done, but captures the insane wild west with crack cocaine feel of Werner Herzog’s movie. Plus as great as Rasco’s poster is we’ve had the red-face Nic Cage poster with Martin Scorsese’s BRINGING OUT THE DEAD.
Here’s Sean Hartter’s winning poster:
Mr. Hartter will be getting three professional prints of his artwork for himself, a DVD pack containing 5 Nicolas Cage movies and 5 Werner Herzog movies, a Lena Herzog photography book signed by Werner and their art posted at the official Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans website, twitter page, facebook page, etc.
Congratulations to him.
Instead of just leaving it there I wanted to showcase some other entries that jumped out at me, so let’s take a look at some of the talented designs!
This entry from James M. Dunlap might have been my pick for winner if a few more elements fell into place. He had some trouble exporting the Photoshop documents, so the credits didn’t look right, which throws off his design a bit. But I love the poster, it’s very Saul Bass and feels like it’d come right out of the late ‘60s or early ‘70s.
David Craig’s entry was another really inventive design that really does capture the insanity of the movie.
Craig McDaniel had two entries, both of which I liked a lot. My favorite of the two was this one for pure design aesthetics:
His second poster is also good and gets bonus points for featuring the frankly graphic hotness of Fairuza Balk.
There were a few cartoony entries that I quite liked for different reasons. I’ll run ‘em for you now. First up is Ali Eldridge’s entry:
Brian Gilles’ entry feels more like the cover of the comic book adaptation, but shows a real artistic eye and composition:
And Terrence Horan’s entry:
And perhaps my favorite of the cartoon interpretations is Brian Christian’s piece:
Mitch Sheffield’s entry wanted to make New Orleans a character on the poster as well as Mr. Cage and Ms. Mendes:
Danny J. Gibson’s entry feels like a Criterion cover of a Wes Anderson movie.
Jason Nelson’s entry has an iguana growing out of Nicolas Cage’s forehead. Bonus points!
Yabori Sequeira’s poster is pretty rad design-wise. Love the mirror images and the satellite view of Nawlins over the dead gator.
Matthew Smith’s solid entry has an illegal substance (quite a common theme in the entries I must note) and wooden-head Nic Cage:
These last two were in the running for a while and might be able to fight over 3rd and 4th places if there were more prizes. First up is “distich”’s grainy b/w poster showcasing Cage’s unhinged performance.
And finally Alwin Jansma from the Netherlands had this montage poster which was sharp as hell… another finalist if he had been eligible.
Great work guys and congratulations again to the winner!
I know it’s a Twilight weekend, but if this flick opened up near you give it a whirl. It has 100% less 17 year old abs, which is probably why it didn’t win the weekend, but it’s a great, bizarre ballsy flick. My chat with director Werner Herzog will be hitting sometime in the next 24-36 hours.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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