Help! Movie Poster
It is a reprint of the promotional poster of a movie Help! directed by Richard Lester, starring The Beatles. The four band members - John, Paul, George and Ringo - are standing on the top of a three-dimensional-like logo "Help".
While a design of promotional artworks of that age tends to be too-much and flashy, this poster has a modest and simple tone manner. I like its combination of a red-colored logo and black and white background.
The members are posing to convey message in the semaphore system. Although their semaphore have often been mistakenly interpreted as a letter "Help", actually, it doesn’t spell out the message "Help". Robert Freeman, a photographer who took the cover photo, testified that they “decided to improvise and ended up with the best graphic positioning of the arms”, because semaphore letter "Help" didn’t look good.
The Beginning of Deepening Stage for The Beatles?
What do you think the most significant difference between visual artworks of Help! and that of former Beatles albums/movies? In my opinion, compared with former album covers, the art of Help! is remarkable for the point that the artwork was designed visually with brilliant artistic concept.
Regarding their former album; Please Please Me (1963), With The Beatles(1963), A Hard Day's Night(1964) and Beatles For Sale(1964), each album covers feature normal portraits of band members, and have no strong visual message or concepts. And, it might be a conventional and ordinary fashion for album cover design. While, on the other hand, the visual artwork of Help! itself contains artistic concepts and meaning. Put simply, The Beatles began putting their message on not only their songs but also the visual artwork.
Actually, Help! project is said to be the crucial turning point for The Beatles; the start of their next deepening stage as an artist. Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday, which showed Paul had begun seeking more sophisticated way of music composition.
Since then, getting tired to be “Idle Group”, The Beatles was becoming to focus on conceptual aspects of musical composing and recordings, in which all the elements, including visual images, were controlled with coherent concept. That was a serious quest of how pop music and the show business should be, and it led to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, that was said to be the world’s first concept album.
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You might also like the artworks of Yellow Submarine poster or Rubber Soul poster.
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