They Call Me Baby Driver

To promote its movie Baby Driver (2017), Sony Pictures commissioned an artist to make an online poster. The poster features the main character of the movie, Baby, leaning on his heist getaway car while listening to music on his iPod. The city towering above him and the titled angle of the poster hint that something is wrong, but Baby could not look more nonchalant. Most of the poster uses a warm red-orange tone set against a dark night. The only exception is the bright white cord connecting Baby’s ears to his iPod. These are all very deliberate design choices made to emphasize features of the movie that Sony wants to hook in the audience to make them buy tickets.

This poster‘s design is beautiful and effective. Its most obvious strength is the simplicity of the color scheme it represents. The contrast between the warm and dark tones mirrors the cinematography of the final act of the film. In that act, the director uses bright neon lights against dark backgrounds to give characters a cinematic spotlight. The poster also does an excellent job of guiding the viewer’s eye. Without the tilted angle, many of the lines in the poster would be horizontal and boring. With the tilt, they take on a more dynamic appearance and point the eye inwards towards Baby’s head. Every single line takes the viewer’s eye to the same spot. The designer put the poster's most important information on a line that goes through the center of the frame. While the viewer’s eye is moving towards Baby, they also see the name of the director, the title of the film. If they look closely they can see a few of the other credits underneath the street sign. The font choice for these credits is perfect. They blend in with the background, but are also distinct enough to be easily read.

The poster does a good job of communicating essential information about the movie. By looking at it, the audience can see all the hooks meant to draw us in. First, there is a car pointed right at the audience that takes up a large portion of the poster. Since Baby Driver is a movie about a getaway driver, cars are an essential part of it. The gimmick in Baby Driver is that Baby has tinnitus. He plays music to drown out the ringing in his ears and to help coordinate his driving. The director synchronizes almost every cut or action in the film with the rhythm of Baby's music in the scene. The poster shows this emphasis on music in two ways. First, it shows Baby casually preoccupied with his iPod instead of showing him in a cliche action pose like in most other action movie posters. Second, the buildings in the background of the poster look like massive volume bars that would be on a stereo playing music. The final hook of the movie is the character of Baby, played by the popular actor Ansel Elgort. To show off this, the poster aggressively guides the viewer’s eye towards his face. This goes beyond the lines pointing to Baby. His head is almost perfectly on an intersection of two lines in the rule of thirds. As a result, our eyes naturally go towards him.

This poster for Baby Driver does an excellent job of using its design to its advantage. The lines in it all point towards the star of the movie to emphasize his importance. The colors in the poster mirror the cinematography of the final act of the film. The use of space and subtle symbolism make it eye-catching and fascinating. This poster looks fantastic and uses some extremely tight design to great effect.