Photos courtesy Roland DGA
The new Disney movie Saving Mr. Banks uses inkjet-printed wide-format graphics to set the stage for a story spanning two continents and more than 50 years, as it tells how the movie version of Mary Poppins was made.
Starring Emma Thompson as Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, Saving Mr. Banks features more than 186 m2 (2,000 sf) of vintage-backdrop graphics produced with Roland DGA large-format printers, primarily for two period settings: Los Angeles International Airport in the 1960s and the Allora Fair in turn-of-the-century Australia.
To recreate these venues, graphic designer Martin T. Charles of SagaBoy Productions researched old photos for his hand-drawn illustrations, digitized them and embellished them with design software for more than 185 ads, signs and décor elements.
“For the fair scene, we created dozens of enormous banners, some as long as 9.1 m (30 ft),” he says. “The airport graphics were equally imposing. You need to be mindful of registration lines and colour consistency across the largest prints.”
Another challenge was recreating the hand-painted methods of the times.
“The pigments and materials used in signmaking decades ago were much more rugged,” says Charles. “To achieve an authentic look, we stomped on the prints to age them.”
