There's a new Dune movie in the works, directed by Denis Villeneuve, and saying this will probably come back to bite me in the ass but it looks like it might actually be good. To promote the film, Warner Bros recently released a series of character posters featuring grim, underlit studies of each major member of the cast.
They're all here: The dutiful, doomed Leto, treacherous Yueh, the Beast Rabban, roguish Duncan Idaho, and all the rest. They look pretty damn good, too—this is an impressive cast.
Taking inspiration from those posters, redditor Xam3l created a series of similar character posters drawn from BioWare's Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Instead of the actor and character name, though, each Mass Effect poster bears the name of the character and some honorific: Commander Shepard is The Spectre, for instance, while Legion is The Machine and Jack is Subject Zero.
(You'll notice a few duplicates in there: Xam3l reworked a few of the ideas (and added a pile of new ones) in a follow-up thread.)
It's pretty spectacular work, and it really captures the cinematic feel of the Dune posters—if it wasn't such a direct lift of the style I'd urge BioWare to contact Xam3l about licensing the images for official use.
"When I saw the newly released Dune posters, I felt the need to remix them," Xam3l, a content creator, videogame photographer, and (obviously) big Mass Effect fan, explained. "Saw a couple of memes, but I wanted a serious spin on it. So, I thought of Mass Effect for the vast cast of characters, sci-fi setting and because I have hundreds and hundreds of photos taken during my journey on Legendary Edition on Series X."
"There was also this voyeurism feeling in those Dune posters, like if they used stills from the movie or BTS, something that feels very much 'videogamey'. In Mass Effect photomode we don’t have dynamic poses and are limited to the characters' movement during gameplay and exploration, so everything that we can capture is also very voyeur like."
Xam3l said the process of creating the photos was actually fairly simple: After capturing character images using the Legendary Edition's photo mode, it was a (relatively) straightforward matter of cropping and upscaling, adding the text with similar fonts, and fiddling with color grades to give them more of a Dune-like look. As for why some characters, like Miranda and James, that's simple too: Xam3l hadn't thought of this when he was capturing the images, so he didn't make any effort to ensure that he took good shots of everyone.
He is going to continue working on it, though: "Thanks to the community feedback and all the wholesome responses, I will certainly complete the set," he said.
If you like the posters and want to see more, you can follow Xam3l's work on Instagram.
