FIRST LOOK

Introducing Our 2021 Membership Banner Art Made by Liza Shumskaya

by Alex Billington
August 16, 2021

We love cinema, you love cinema, let's all celebrate our love for cinema! A few months back we launched a FirstShowing membership program with Steady (check it out - become a member) in hopes of stepping forward into the future with the direct support of our readers. So far, a fair amount of readers have become members and your support means everything to us. This funding helps us keep our servers running, and the lights on. Our membership page on Steady has a space for an image, so we commissioned one of our favorite cinema designers - a Ukrainian artist named Liza Shumskaya - to create an image celebrating our love of movies. And the result is this wonderful tribute to the power of cinema: to bring us all together and to make us laugh and cry and smile. We are excited to unveil this exclusive art as we head into the fall movie season.

Below you can view the full banner art made by Liza. Based in Kiev, Ukraine, she designs posters and other movie art - you can follow her on Twitter @Liza_Shumska or on Instagram @kino_maniac. You can also find her full portfolio here. We wanted to find someone who could put their own unique touch on this artwork, while honoring the "magic of movies" that connects us. Check it out and click to view the membership page:

Everything about this banner art expresses what we love about cinema and the incomparable joy of watching movies together. Not only fresh popcorn, but also all the laughs, and cheers, and scary moments, and sad moments; and movies that remind us to keep on livin' the good life no matter what. Liza designed a poster that includes some of the most iconic movie-watching scenes of all-time, from some of our personal favorite movies anyway. The image features: Ryan Gosling & Emma Stone from La La Land, Audrey Tautou from Amelie, Morgan Freeman & Tim Robbins from The Shawshank Redemption, Salvatore Cascio from Cinema Paradiso, Frank the Rabbit from Donnie Darko, Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Zooey Deschanel from 500 Days of Summer, Deadpool from, uh, Deadpool, and Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver. Your membership support goes directly towards helping us hire & commission artists like Liza to create more work and build a career in the film industry. Along with helping us support distinct writers and other voices in the film community.

And here's one of our fave scenes in a cinema from Donnie Darko, when Donnie takes Gretchen on a date:

Thank you for supporting FirstShowing and reading this website - please consider becoming a member. And thank you for supporting the film community - artists, creators, writers, directors, designers, and everyone who works in cinema. We'd love to feature more artwork from our favorite cinema artists from time to time, and hopefully with your support we'll be able to. Until then, see you at the movies! And please stay safe. 😷

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