Hollywood is no stranger to branding. The film Alien is a perfect example of how Hollywood is exploiting famous and popular films today by extending the brand's life with trilogies, quadrilogies, crossovers, sequels and so on. George Lucas, true to his reputation as a visionary producer and film-maker, took it one step further and came up with an innovative series of what he calls prequels, with his Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and, to top all of this, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the beginning of the story he did not show in the first film. With his prequels, he has given Hollywood another avenue to extend a previous film's success by going back to the future, so to speak.
A single slogan promoted Alien's script to studio executives: "Jaws in space." Marketing for Alien started in 1979 with posters on lamp posts in Johannesburg, South Africa, featuring a fantastic visual of a outlandish leathery egg-like object - floating above a rather neglected and run-down industrial-type metal grid - with a crack leaking a yellow light edged by a strange, bright-green mist, all contrasted against a black background.
Heading the poster is the widely spaced word 'A L I E N' in capitals and in a modern sans-serif type design, the slogan "In space no one can hear you scream" is strategically placed between the egg and the grid. The billing announced the then unknown director Ridley Scott and cast Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt and Veronica Cartwright. Even though Weaver plays the leading role, she is ranked after Tom Skerritt in the billing - presumably because of Skerritt's standing as opposed to her then unknown status as an actress.
Alien was unique in many ways. It was a science-fiction horror film made in the late 1970s when such films were a rarity. Alien's representation of the ship's crew has also had a huge influence. For the first time, a blockbuster science-fiction film depicted space travellers as blue-collar company employees (or "space jockeys" rather than as highly empowered agents of a military-style entity, such as in Star Trek or Star Wars).
Sigourney Weaver was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for portraying Ripley in Aliens (the sequel to Alien) and went on to become one of the most highly paid actress of the 1990s. Alien won the 1979 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and also received a nomination for Best Art Direction - Set Decoration. It went on to win many other awards and, in 2002, the United States National Film Registry deemed the film "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and inducted it into its collection. In 2007, Empire magazine named the "chestburster" scene in Alien the greatest 18-rated movie moment ever as part of its 18th birthday issue.
Alien has been called one of the most influential of modern action pictures and became a critical and a box-office success, spawning a Hollywood media franchise of literature, video games, merchandise and three official sequels. It was released as a quadrilogy and crossed over with the Predator film series, Alien vs. Predator (2004) and the sequel to the crossover, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).
Incidentally, the now-famous director Ridley Scott (his films include Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down) started his career with a master's degree in graphic design at London's Royal College of Art and cut his teeth on UK television commercials in the 1970s. In 1984, Apple Computer launched the Macintosh computer (Macintosh also known by the endearing nickname of Mac) and its debut was announced by a single broadcast of the now famous US$1,5-million commercial, based on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and directed by Ridley Scott. His training as a graphic designer and his sound understanding of branding principles are obvious and they definitely contributed to the success of Alien and the sequels.
Friends Link : Cheap Online Shopping
No comments:
Post a Comment