Construction on the poster for the 2012 True/False Film festival is now complete. Check it out:

The poster was created by Los Angeles–based designer Erik Buckham. He also directed this year’s awesome animated trailer, which you may have already seen on TV:

The theme of this year’s poster is “The Influencing Machine,” an idea that True/False co-conspirators David Wilson and Paul Sturtz first ran across in an essay by Christopher Turner in Cabinet magazine. The essay tells the story of Victor Tausk, a student of Sigmund Freud’s, who studied the elaborate mechanical constructions that schizophrenics invented to explain their delusions. These “Influencing Machines,” in Tausk’s description, resembled nothing so much as psychological, paranoid film projectors.

As Turner explains, Tausk took the name “Influencing Machine” from a “magical invention” of Francis Hauksbee, an eighteenth-century English scientist (and disciple of Isaac Newton’s). Elements of Hauksbee’s machine are pretty clearly recognizable in Erik Buckham’s design for the  the 2012 True/False poster: as Turner describes it, Hauksbee’s machine was

a spinning glass globe, which cracked like lightning when touched, transmitting an electrical spark and emitting a greenish neon light when rubbed—a mysterious luminosity which was called “the glow of life.” These apparently supernatural effects were caused by the introduction of static electricity into a vacuum; it worked like the shimmering vacuum tube of the modern TV.

In addition to bringing the Influencing Machine to life for True/False, Erik Buckham has designed some of the most beautiful and recognizable film posters in recent memory, from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to Where the Wild Things Are, including several top-shelf documentaries:

Buckham will be on-hand in Columbia at this year’s festival to give a workshop on graphic design—watch this space for details and updates. In the meantime, he answered a few questions about this year’s poster and his work as a film-poster artist.

T/F: How did you develop the True/False poster?

ERIK BUCKHAM: The influencing machine concept was perfect: it’s conceptually interesting, and at the same time it’s visually striking. I’ve always been attracted to the design of old machinery, especially from around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I was eager to do my own version of one of these machines. So the process of making the art for this year’s festival became mostly about engineering the influencing machine itself. Most of my time went into figuring out what each of the different sections did, and what technologies would be a part of it. We wanted to incorporate old and new technologies, so it wouldn’t look too period-specific. The final machine looks like it was built over the course of an entire century—but whether it was built by human hands or if it somehow self-generated remains uncertain.

We originally designed it with a human figure working at the instrument panel, but eventually we took it out to keep a greater ambiguity about who controls the machine. I think we all still have different interpretations: what it does, exactly, and how.

T/F: What techniques did you use to make the image? How much of it is your drawing, and how much is collage? 

EB: It’s a big mess of different techniques. Much of it is heavily manipulated stock photography: pieces of old tractors, car steering wheels, stuff like that. I don’t know any 3D programs, which probably would have made my life much easier, but I like how the final result has more of a haphazard illustration feel because of it. At first it was a little too Monty Python-esque in its collage feel, so we took it in a more realistic direction—if you can call it that.

T/F: How much do you rely on computers in your work?

EB: I’m really into layering techniques in Photoshop. You can achieve interesting results when you experiment with textures and color layers to create atmosphere. But I really don’t think of myself as a big Photoshop guy. I use it every day, of course, but I tend not to rely too much on “tricks” to make things. It’s pretty easy to look at a poster and see the obvious Photoshop work behind it. Most big-budget movie posters have this really slick look to them that I can’t stand—everything is so perfectly retouched and overly lit with artificial light. I think the best work doesn’t have that slick digital gloss to it, unless there’s a real idea behind why you’d do it that way.

I like looking at an image and not being able to say how it was created.

T/F: What’s your approach to text in film posters? 

It depends on the project, but much of the time I begin by thinking about the type. The title of the film is the most important piece of information that people need to take away. I try hard to get an idea into the typography, even if it’s subtle. This poster uses a custom typeface; very rarely do I use a typeface right out of the can.

T/F: I heard you actually built an influencing machine.

EB: I wish! I actually had that idea early on. I went to an old electronics graveyard in the hopes of putting something together. I wanted to make a whole cabinet that housed the influencing machine that I could then bring to the festival. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that it would end up taking way too much time. Sometimes I get a little too ambitious with this stuff.