Making a Movie Poster

With the Oscars coming up later this month, I thought it would be fun to figure out how to make a movie poster with InDesign. Specifically, how to get the typical look of the credits that appear at the bottom of the poster. The common Hollywood approach is for the person’s name to be preceded by the credit in smaller, stacked type.

There are a few ways to accomplish this, one of which was described way back in issue #3 of InDesign Magazine. I decided to try tables since it seemed like a natural way to get that stacked type to line up with the person’s name.

I started with a table with two rows and six columns.

Each row would hold one line of the stacked type.

I selected and merged the cells that would hold the people’s names.

I entered the text for the credits and names.

Then it was just a matter of choosing the formatting for the type,

making styles to apply that formatting,

fiddling with some of the cell options to get things into alignment,

and then adjusting the width of the cells to fit the text.

To that end, a script (written by Marc Autret and updated by Kasyan Servetsky) saves a little effort. Put your cursor in a cell and run the script to shrink the cell width to fit the contents.

Repeat the process using separate tables for each line of names.