…Here’s our RED STATE teaser poster.

Moody, weird, and pitch-perfect for the tone of the film. If I went out to an ad agency here in town, I’d be billed close to 20 grand for a campaign that’d maybe… maybe… include this poster. But this piece of artwork (I call it “The Holy Ghost”) didn’t come from a top-tier ad agency: Jon Gordon is my RED STATE producer, and this poster was created by his assistant, Melissa Bloom. So we’ve got a marketing image that was put together by someone who was on set every day, integral to the process that produced the film which inspired this image. This isn’t the work of some gun for hire who’s doing six other campaigns; we’re not just one of many. The marketer is actually family, RED from pre-production all the way through wrap, so she’s got an insight into the flick that no ad agency could ever boast (not even one-time Glo-Coat golden boy Don Draper over at SCDP). I’ll take passion over pedigree any day.

When we first looked at Melissa’s poster, someone said “You should give this to the ad agency as a guideline.” Guideline? Was an ad agency gonna make us any happier than Melissa’s image made us? The Holy Ghost is kinda perfect, and more importantly? It gives us a starting point from which to launch our home-grown marketing campaign. There’s an immediacy to it, but also: anybody could’ve taken the initiative and did this themselves. If folks were wondering why Melissa was skating up near the blue line, far from the corner where the puck was, it’s because she saw where the puck was gonna be, and just waited to make her rush on goal. She shoots, she scores.

So Melissa (with a Gretzky-like assist by Ming), the person on the RED STATE crew least likely to spearhead our marketing campaign, gets the collar for this arresting image – and I fucking dig that. That’s what I mean by self-reliance: why go outside the family for shit we can do ourselves? Promote from within – the way Harvey taught us.

Catch the full length post exclusively at Kevin’s blog.

The widely-read Ain’t It Cool News and the great Empire Magazine also caught wind of the poster, which gets the word out that the film exists and gets people talking — And with any independent film, awareness is key. We’re hoping that the buzz can get the film into Sundance, which takes place from January 20th through the 30th, 2011.