Check it out! An actual Player One blog post! An actual sorta-reason to come to our main page! Maybe now we won’t feel all guilty for asking people to go here during our show outro.
I was looking through some old backup CDs from my Ziff Davis days earlier this evening, and I found all sorts of crazy pictures/poorly-Photoshopped images that we used to amuse ourselves back on Expert Gamer and GameNOW. Many of them are extremely in-jokey, “you had to be there” kinda deals, but I figured that “outsiders” would appreciate this one.
There is a bit of a story behind it, though. Back in late 2001, there was a contest to design the movie poster for the then-upcoming Resident Evil film. Mike Vallas, one of the head art guys at Ziff, was a huge RE fan, and he jumped at the chance to design the poster. You might remember Vallas as the guy who told the show-stopping anecdote at the end of our Andy Baran tribute episode (#145).
Contestants were given access to all sorts of artwork, including logos and various poses of the movie’s stars. Most of the pictures were the standard stuff that you might expect…Milla Jovovich brandishing large guns, random zombies…that sorta thing. Among all the images, however, was one picture that really stood out. Instead of a grim-faced shot of Milla or Michelle Rodriguez in some sort of “action movie” pose, it was a close-up of Milla with a delightful grin on her face. It looked remarkably out of place–definitely not an image that would sell a zombie movie.
We all had a good laugh at the picture, and joked about how we should make a poster using that image to enter into the contest. Not one to let a good joke die, Vallas actually went ahead and did so after whipping up a trio of fantastic (and serious) posters for his own entry. This is what he came up with:
We were all extremely pleased with the results. At the risk of unintentionally taking any credit for this, I didn’t create any of it. The design and the tag line were all Vallas. Because Vallas wanted to enter his “real” entries (or maybe just one of them…I can’t remember if there was a limit to the number of entries one could submit), the idea was for me to enter the joke poster. Unfortunately, my laziness (and probably some hectic magazine deadlines) caused me to miss the entry date.
It’s a shame, really. For all I know, the movie producers would have loved the idea. They might have completely reworked the film to fit the poster’s aesthetic. Maybe that movie would have actually ended up being good (ho-ho!).
Bonus Trivia!: Unfortunately, Vallas didn’t win the contest. Strangely enough, however, the winner was another videogame magazine editor: Nick “Nick Rox” Des Barres, of GameFan and Play fame. I don’t recall the exact details of the contest, but Nick’s poster didn’t end up as the one used in theaters/on the DVD case (at least, not that I’ve ever seen). If memory serves, this is Nick’s winning poster.
Phil Theobald Video Games, Ziff-Davis Expert Gamer, GameNOW, Milla Jovovich, movie, poster, Resident Evil, Ziff-Davis, zombies
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