An unseen archive of movie poster art­work is being published

Even if you’ve nev­er watched a Star Wars film, chances are you’ll be famil­iar with the above image – but you won’t have seen this exact one before. That’s because it’s part of a mas­sive archive of movie poster art called the Fer­ef Col­lec­tion, a ver­i­ta­ble trea­sure trove dat­ing from the company’s incep­tion in 1968, which until now has nev­er been avail­able to the public.

The vast col­lec­tion con­sists of thou­sands of pieces – from con­cept art to fin­ished art­work – span­ning more than half a cen­tu­ry. Many of the designs are alter­na­tive and unused ver­sions of clas­sic posters you know and love, such as The Empire Strikes Back and Aliens (which was orig­i­nal­ly sub­ti­tled ​‘The Return’) – but there’s also hun­dreds of more obscure titles, mak­ing this a fas­ci­nat­ing look back at cinema’s for­got­ten history.

When our friends at Fer­ef, one of the world’s lead­ing film mar­ket­ing agen­cies, reached out to us about the project we knew we had to share it with our read­ers. They’ve launched a crowd­fund­ing cam­paign to turn the archive into a deluxe cof­fee table book, bring­ing this unique visu­al record to life.

“The pur­pose of the Kick­starter is to cre­ate a hard­back book that cel­e­brates this incred­i­ble archive and the process, craft and immense cre­ativ­i­ty of the artists involved,” says Cre­ative Direc­tor Tim Reeves. ​“Fer­ef were instru­men­tal in the cam­paigns for the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­o­gy; these ear­ly illus­tra­tions for The Empire Strikes Back were cre­at­ed by Eddie Paul (one of the E’s in Fer­ef) from pro­duc­tion stills.”

Check out more images from the archive below and find out more at kick​starter​.com