Lessons from battle scenes: It’s all about the build-up

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers features a fantastic battle scene: the battle for Helm’s Deep. There’s a lot of reasons why it works. The scale and physicality of it is awesome. But there is one factor that is underrated.

In the DVD commentary, director Peter Jackson talked about watching famous sieges and battles of film, like Zulu. He said that what he learned from those was that the secret was all in the build-up.

The movie spends a lot of time making sure that the audience understands the situation. The fortress is literally set against a mountain, creating the impression of “backs against the wall.” The city is outnumbered, with hundreds of defenders against thousands of attackers.

And you see that army of thousands marching in. Not doing anything at first. Just standing there. Then thumping their spears and yelling.

More waiting.

And then the army charges and all hell breaks loose and it is on. And when those orc charge and start throwing ladders up against the fortress walls, you are invested and ready to see what happens next.

The battle itself is only about ten minutes of film. It would have been easy to not show the orcs doing their “haka” and charge into the action, particularly in a movie that asks you to stay in your seat as long as the Lord of the Rings films do.

On a poster, the Results section is like the action part of the battle, when arrows are flying, axes are wielded, and explosions are going off. Too many poster makers want to charge into the action. Many poster presenters want to get to the stuff they find exciting as soon as possible.

But an audience member has to care. They need the set up. They need to know what the stakes are. They need to know the landscape the project is set in.

That means you should spend a lot of time thinking about the first part of your poster. This is important both in the design of your poster, and how you are going to talk about your poster. How are you going to bring someone who has never thought about your subject on board and interested in the outcome?

By telling them what the conflict is. By telling them the complication you are trying to solve. By setting up a scenario, then throwing in a “But...” moment. You have to be crystal clear in that introduction. If you can do that, people will follow you through the battle to see the resolution.

External links

15 years later, no one’s matched LOTR’s Battle at Helm’s Deep

Comments

Critique: Neutrino topology

Physics is not the best represented academic field on this blog, so I was pleased to get this submission from Paola Ferrario, who was kind enough to share this with readers of the blog. Click to enlarge! I like many things about this poster. The typography is clean. The big central circle attracts the eye and breaks up the monotony of rectangles. There aren’t a huge number of words. The margins between all the elements are comfortable. There are pictures of real objects. Logos are mostly kept down in the inf print section. There is a good use of bright colours to highlight headings. I have one major problem. I know where to start reading the poster. I know where I should end up when I finish reading the poster. What I am supposed to do between those two points is completely baffling to me. The text in that big central circle is particularly baffling. That it is set against a different shape and colour provides a visual cue that suggests it isn’t part of the main text. It looks like a ...

Showing authorship on posters

More and more academic projects are collaborative . This means more contributors, and more authors to list on posters. I’ve been thinking about how long author lists might be best displayed on posters, and have a few attempts here. You can click to enlarge any picture! This might be the simplest multi-author scenario, where there are many authors, all from one institution. Many big collaborative projects involve people from different institutions, however. How can you show the affiliations of those authors? Many people emulate journals and use superscripts. This gets very complicated to read and difficult to read very quickly, however. Another approach might be to group the contributors by their institution. Let “relative contribution” or “alphabetical order” or “whatever other reason you have for deciding the order of authors” be damned. Everyone from a particular university goes together. This chews up more space, so you might be forced to use initials for the authors and cut back on...

When posters fail

When a poster fails, it’s usually because it failed early in the design process. Years ago , I showed this poster: It does not matter whether this poster does a lot of the detail work right. It does not matter how good the layout is, or how good the typography is, or whether the colour scheme is consistent and pleasing to the eye, or whether there is enough white space. None of that matters. The authors of this poster doomed it at the very beginning, when they picked a page size... and got it wrong. In my experience, there are two places where posters fail early on. On the content side, people do not edit enough . They want to include everything, rather than focusing on one thing, and the poster suffers. On the design side, people do not make a grid . They start drawing boxes without any underlying thought to structure, and treat their data like some sort of jigsaw puzzle to fit together. I was reminded of the while I was making a poster for the Student and Post-Doctoral Affairs Com...

publisher tips

Search This Blog