A Poster Design Built on Secrets

How I approached secrecy, concealment, and psychological tension in my concept poster for Spielberg’s Disclosure Day

The project: design a movie poster for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day.

The challenge? Designing for a movie permanently stuck in “teaser mode.” No confirmation of aliens. No confirmation of plot. No confirmation of what was really happening at all.

At the time, only one trailer had been released. There was the haunting scene of Emily Blunt’s character suddenly speaking in tongues (alien clue? okay.), then animals becoming strangely aware, then nuns (wait... are Catholics somehow involved in this?), then a glowing eye, the world standing still, and hints of telepathic technology.

Everything about the marketing felt fragmented. The only clear themes floating around were concealment, institutional secrecy, and the collective confrontation of truth.

Which, honestly, made the project both exciting and psychologically exhausting. 

Normally, if I were working on a film campaign, there would be a creative brief plus themes clearly outlined by a marketing team. But for this poster, I was completely on my own, trying to reverse-engineer a movie from fragments of opinions, reviews, articles, podcasts…like some kind of conspiracy theorist sitting with an ipad at 3am. 

And the more I dug into the material, the more I realized something important: The mystery itself WAS the visual language.

Avoiding the Obvious

From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to lean into obvious alien imagery.

No UFO hovering over a city.
No giant beams of light.
No glowing finger touching foreheads.

The trailer clearly wanted to instill uncertainty. It hinted at something massive without fully revealing too much plot. I wanted the poster to do the same.I wanted psychological intrigue instead of high-budget explosions. 

The feeling I kept chasing was dread mixed with emotional imbalance. That unsettling sense that something is wrong beneath the surface, even if you can’t fully explain it. I wanted the viewer to feel like they had stumbled onto something they were never supposed to see. 

The First Direction: Truth Coming Apart

My earliest concept actually had nothing to do with government documents.

I became obsessed with the idea of truth physically unraveling. I explored imagery involving frayed fabric and tearing materials, almost as if reality itself was starting to come apart at the seams. Or that reality had always been just a construct of someone else’s imagination. At first, I loved it.

The visuals had tension. They felt tactile and damaged and psychologically unstable. It also would provide me a technical challenge in rendering fabric in my style. 

But after rendering it, I noticed the tone drifting too far into horror territory. It started feeling less like “concealed truth” and more like memory coming apart. Almost like Emily Blunt’s character herself was disintegrating. It looked cool... but not quite right.

So I pivoted.

The Turning Point

The breakthrough came after I started digging deeper into themes of Government secrecy. Religious secrecy. Collective secrecy. The trailer kept hinting that humanity itself was being kept in the dark somehow.

And then the thought hit me: What if the poster itself functioned like classified material? What if the audience had to “unredact” the truth? 

That idea unlocked something.

The original version of the concept actually showed Emily Blunt’s full face, with the copy and redactions projected across her portrait. But the more I stared at it, the more I realized I was accidentally doing the opposite of concealment. So I started removing her. Peeling her apart the way imagined she’d do in the movie. And suddenly the poster revealed itself.

Hiding the Protagonist in Plain Sight

One of the ideas I kept circling back to was the possibility that Emily Blunt’s character wasn’t just witnessing the mystery… but somehow connected to it.

The trailer drops tiny clues that suggest she may be implicated in ways she doesn’t even understand yet. Is she a conduit? An abductee? Part of the phenomenon itself?
Does she know more than she realizes?

I have no idea if any of those theories are true, obviously. The movie still hasn’t premiered as I write this. But that uncertainty became part of the design process.

By concealing most of her face, I liked the idea that SHE herself might be the hidden truth buried inside the documents.

Why the Eye Matters

The eye became the anchor of the entire design. Partly because the glowing eye had already been established in the film’s marketing, but also because eyes carry such symbolism. Eyes are the thing we instinctively search for first in another person. I wanted to show behind it all, there was a human seeing truth for the first time, as were we.

The Hardest Part

Ironically, the hardest part of this project wasn’t the illustration itself. It was restraint.

Balancing my instinct as an illustrator with the discipline required for conceptual poster design was difficult. I’m used to creating lush, highly rendered imagery where the artwork itself takes center stage. Here, I was intentionally covering most of my own work.

Technically, the balance was tricky too. The redactions had to feel readable while still allowing enough of Emily Blunt’s likeness to come through. The lighting and color cast had to feel tense and cinematic without drifting fully into horror. And because the composition relied so heavily on negative space, every single redaction placement mattered. I had to prioritize the conceptual thinking over the illustrative execution.

What This Poster Taught Me

This project challenged the way I think about movie poster design.It taught me that conceptual clarity matters more than rendering technique. That a poster is not just about making beautiful art. It’s about boiling down an emotion into a single image.

More importantly, it showed me that my style can translate into other genres while still feeling like mine.

I’ve always had a naturally “heroic” approach to portraiture. I like my subjects to feel elevated, iconic, emotional. What surprised me was realizing that those touches could still exist inside other genres without losing their epicness. That realization honestly opened a new door for me creatively.

The Future of Illustrated Movie Posters

I genuinely believe illustrated posters are going to become even more important in the age of AI-generated imagery. As audiences become flooded with disposable content and endlessly recycled photographic layouts, handcrafted illustration becomes a signal of intention and authorship. 

Just like “Filmed in IMAX” became shorthand for premium quality, I think illustrated posters are slowly becoming shorthand for artistic prestige. In pop culture, illustrated posters become personal artifacts. Collectibles. Statements of taste. Pieces people hang onto long after the marketing campaign ends. That’s the kind of challenge I want to keep chasing after.