2025 Official Poster Unveiled

We are delighted to unveil the Exit 6 Film Festival 2025 poster by local artist Liam Kelleher!

For the 10th edition of Exit 6 Film Festival, we once again commissioned a local Basingstoke artist to design our official poster for the festival. This year, it was the turn of Liam Kelleher, sought out very early on by Creative Director, Carl Austin.

Carl said: "As this is our 10th year, we wanted the poster to celebrate everything that makes Exit 6 special—the people, the energy, and the memories we’ve made along the way. Liam has captured all of that with a brilliantly fun design that reflects not just the spirit of the festival, but also the team behind it. With a nostalgic 80s vibe and nods to past guests and highlights, it’s a perfect way to mark this milestone year."

On working on the project, Liam said:

"As a freelance illustrator, every now and again, you talk about project through with a client and you know exactly what to suggest and how much fun it will be, if they run with it.

This, was one of those projects.

While I have Forest Gump’d my way through a 12 year illustration career, before that I was an enthusiastic screenwriting student, supplementing my student lifestyle (re: partying) by taking on storyboard jobs for film-making students. It was during this period that I discovered the work of Drew Struzan, who’s stunningly detailed hand drawn and painted movie posters bought to life and sold the drama of the likes of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Blade Runner.

When Carl and I sat down to talk about the poster design for this year’s Exit 6 festival, he

expressed that it would be great if the poster would evoke the experience that guests would go through without leaning too heavily on the iconography that we associate with film-making, and, also, if it could feature Basingstoke as the location of the festival and evoke the 80’s too, that would be great…

“Are you familiar with the work of Drew Struzan, at all..?” I asked Carl.

Even if people don’t know Drew Struzan’s name, they recognise his work. It screams film, it is indelible. Struzan had a singular ability to create stunningly complex pieces of illustration with beautiful likenesses that showcased the story, the genre and vibe of a film in a single image. Modern movie poster design, the thing we all see with a series of floating heads (think literally any of the Marvel studios posters) are, frankly, marketing spawned bastardisations of an art form that Andrew Struzan pioneered and has yet to be surpassed at.

Movie studios rarely allow artists to actually design film posters anymore, it is truly a lost art form and Drew Struzan has long ago retired, but if I was ever going to get a chance to shoot my shot, this was probably it…

Underneath the dazzling likenesses, epic vistas and complex lighting of Struzan’s posters, there is an almost obscenely simple compositional device that he employs; no matter how many elements he has to work in, they are always arranged around a series of overlapping primitive shapes. A square. A circle. A triangle. You can remove one element and replace it with another and as long as that simple design remains, you have a poster that works!

There were adjustments to be made along the way, not the least of which was a particularly arch-looking vision of Carl that loomed over the rest of the composition like a Force corrupted Sith Lord, that he rightly asked to be switched out. Luckily, I was supplied with an abundance of brilliant photo references which gave me a surplus of choice as to what to feature on the poster design.

Out of necessity, I had to work digitally when drawing the poster, utilising Procreate, Clip Studio and Photoshop. Where Struzan used graphite, I used an Apple Pencil. Where he used an airbrush and frisket, I used a lovely grungy digital brush that emulates the look and feel of the traditional tool. Where Struzan used pencil crayons to hatch in highlights over the airbrush to render, I spent hours painstakingly adding the same in by hand, layer by layer until my hand began to ache. I did get some paint brushes out at one point to create a spatter texture that was scanned in overlaid against the background in Photoshop to give it that painterly texture! All of this was done with just 7 colours that we agreed had a nice 80’s vibe to them.

This piece was done with a lot of love, in order to capture the love of sitting in a darkened room and watching light begin to flicker across a screen. The love of entertaining. Of being entertained. The love of a shared experience. The love of collaboration and all the magic that comes out of it. The love of telling stories. I’ve focused more on Drew Struzan’s story than my own because this poster wouldn’t exist without him. He’s my inspiration, sure, and I saw a way to solve a lot of creative problems with solutions that he developed and that I learned from but I would love for more people to know the name behind the iconography.

Drew Struzan has been living with Alzheimer’s for a number of years, he is no longer able to paint or sign things for his fans. It’s a horrible terrible disease that takes far too much, but Drew was a brilliant, gifted artist who gave so, so much.

Stories touch everyone in ways that are transcendent and cross generations, distance, language, gender, social status. Everything. They bring us together. From the four year old girl, exuberant from her first cinema experience to the old man who is transported back to another time or place by a scene or line of dialogue that makes him remember exactly when, where and who he was with the first time, so very long ago, as if it was yesterday.

Share your stories. Share each others. All good writers steal everything (and I guess artists do too…)

I’m glad I got to do this. I’m thrilled I got to do my best Struzan impression. I’m humbled that I got to share his story in what was meant to be a press release. Hopefully it’ll mean that a few more people will know the name of my favourite person in film.

Other than Carl of course… (Hey, you think he’ll invite me back to do next year’s poster….? 😉)"

The artwork will be on full display during Exit 6 Film Festival 2025, both in print and proudly projected onto the big screens.

Thank you, Liam!

You can follow Liam Kelleher on Instagram.