When the avgeek, photographer, and designer in me come together to recreate the movie poster for “Sully”.

Design and photography are essential to movie posters. Both of these being my passions, I needed to think of something else in my life that I absolutely love. And then the ah-ha moment came… AVIATION! Yes, it’s a little weird, not gonna lie. I’m that one crazy person who will connect in Atlanta in order to fly on an international aircraft instead of flying nonstop. Now, it was trying to find the right movie to depict.

Recently, Sully, the movie came out. I still haven’t seen it, but I remember that night exactly. It was a January night when a flock of geese took out both engines of US Airways flight 1549. After 208 seconds after taking off from New York’s LaGuardia airport, Captain Sully Sullenberger made the decision to ditch his Airbus A320 aircraft, along with 155 people on board, into the freezing waters of the Hudson. I remember this night very well. We were on our way home after going to Costco. We had just gotten back on Independence Blvd. in Charlotte and my dad turned up the radio. I wasn’t exactly sure what happened, so the minute I got home, I turned on the TV and watched the coverage from there.

Being an Avgeek, making an aviation movie poster meant that it not only had to be realistic but most importantly it had to be accurate. Everything except for the tie and white shirt is apart of a real US Airways uniform that I acquired a few years back from a pilot friend. The uniform wasn’t the same one worn by crews at the time of the crash, however, it still is real!

Editing the Movie Poster

When it came to editing my poster, I wanted to keep it as realistic to the actual Sully movie poster itself as well as to the

I decided to use my own picture of an airplane window I took a few years ago instead of using one from the internet. With the water and clouds, I used images from the Sully Movie website and reconstructed the layers in Photoshop. After doing some simple retouching, I removed the background on my self-portrait and placed it in my poster.

The wings were too difficult to get a hold of, so I was able to find a high-quality picture of them from StanWings.com, an aviation wings website, and photoshopped them on the jacket. The hardest thing about this part was the fact that the new uniforms from US Airways all had silver badges and accents, instead of the gold that are on mine, so I also spent a lot of time photoshopping the wings to make them match the hat.

After finishing my photo, I then went into Illustrator, where I put together the text of the poster. I chose to rename the movie “Brace for Impact” because first off I’m not Sully, but second off it was the words heard from the cockpit before the plane went down.

Here are the direct links to images used from the internet: http://www.sully-movie.com/img/plax-bkg/desk-land_plax_0.png, http://www.sully-movie.com/img/plax-bkg/desk-land_plax_3.png, http://www.sully-movie.com/img/plax-bkg/desk-land_plax_1.png, http://www.sully-movie.com/img/plax-bkg/desk-land_plax_clouds.jpg, http://www.stanwing.com/wings/u/usair/USAir_28-Supervisory%20Captain%20Wing%208th%20Issue.jpg