Film Poster Walkthrough

The first thing I did was go to “File” and select “Place” to pick an image to be the main focus of my poster.

This image is a primary source. I took a slightly low angle shot of these pair of shoes as I wanted to show the power and authority of the person’s shoes it actually is. I selected this image because it is seen in my short horror film “Curiosity” and is worn by the villain, who we don’t actually identify in the film. In my opinion, having object(s) as your main focus rather than a human being or human features is more powerful in terms of getting a message across or to show the horror, mysterious and intricate aspects of your play.

As you can see the laces are done up, however, the boots are marked and scruffy. This is because I wanted people to see that the villain, a female, spends time getting ready, that she’s organised and has enough sanity in her to know what she’s doing. But the scruffs on her shoes suggest she’s not someone who spends has a lot of money to spend on trivial things such as shoes, accessories and clothes but has ‘better’ things to be doing with her time, which is shown in the film.

Once I placed the image onto my A3 template I then proceeded onto removing the unnecessary background as I needed the boots, and just the boots to be the main focus.

I used the “Quick Selection Tool” to remove the background of the image. I was very careful in doing so as I did not want to take out portions of my intended main image as this would be very noticeable in the end product and would lead to further improvements later.

This is what the product looks like when the background is removed from the pair of boots.

I tied the laces up to show the personality of the character through an image. As the antagonist is not identified in the short film the audience need to make as many subconscious assumptions about the antagonist to figure out what she’s like, who’s she’s like as all we give away in the short film is her gender and select parts of her body.

I then proceeded to use the paint bucket tool to fill in my background as I could not leave the background plain.

I chose the colour black for a number of reasons. For films such as Thriller or Horror the majority of posters are very dark and gloomy hence why I chose black. I didn’t have the graphical expertise to do more than but a block colour as the background and as I did want all my products to be primary source the option of getting a textured or patterned background from the internet was out of the question.

In my short film whenever the antagonist is introduced her face is tinted in deep red. To link my film and my poster, I have used the “Black and White” adjustment on Photoshop CC and selected the “Tint” button. I then dragged the colour selector all the way to the top right corner of the colour wheel.

This is the what the pair of boots look like once they are tinted. It’s a very simple edit, however, it is powerful as the colour itself connotes lust, danger and anger. Again, this gives the audience a subconscious insight into the mind of our antagonists without actually giving away the identity.

The font I chose for my title sequence was “Face Your Fears” which I downloaded from www.DaFont.com free of use as I wanted to keep the continuity between each of my products. I chose this because I really enjoyed the look of the font and the name of the font loosely linked with concept of my film of ‘Curiosity’.

Before I put a certificate on my film poster, I decided to research which one would be suitable for my film. I chose certificate 15 as it allowed an infinite amount of strong language in my film. However, I was unsure whether to put this certificate or certificate 18 as my film mentions the c*** word. I decided to stick to certificate 15 as I did not believe it was too much of a nuisance and as I am age 17 it would prevent me from watching my own film. I checked both the Irish and British certificate.

After researching many different film posters and from personal experiences from visiting cinemas and so on I saw that certificates were always positioned in the bottom right corner of posters. Hence why I positioned them in that area. I tried to make them as small as possible as they are not suppose to stand out, however, when my poster was printed out onto A3 paper they were too noticeable which I didn’t expect.

I decided to add an extra warning to my poster as it would be premiering at my school in front of members of staff and I did not want to be accused of not forewarning them.

I found this website really useful when creating my poster. I wanted to have a very authentic film poster and when creating it I didn’t know what fonts to use to highlight the key actors and actresses in my film. I decided to search how to do so and came across this website wegraphics.net which went through a step by step process of how to create a film poster. I found step 7 very useful as it informed me on how to highlight key names. It font called “Myraid Pro” that was already pre-downloaded into my computer. It was a very basic font but had a drastic effect on my Poster and added to its authenticity.

There are all the names of the actors and actresses that performed in my short film. As you can see their second names have been put in bold. This was just a tip provided by wegraphics.net that I decided to heed and it really did have an added effect to my poster.

To make sure that all of my names were aligned on my poster I used the ‘Rulers’ , which is a feature on Photoshop CC, to precisely spread the names out equally. I thought this task, though somewhat time consuming, would make my poster look professionally done.

The website wegraphic.net also included credits on their film poster. The bottom half of my poster was looking very plain so I decided to add credits on to mine also. They had downloaded the font “SF Movie Poster” from Dafont.com as this font is widely used on many different film posters around the world. I downloaded to font but had some trouble with the spacing of the words and gaps between lines, however, I could not fix those problems so I had to leave it how it was.

American Beauty, 1999.

The tagline on this film poster attracted me. I didn’t understand what “look closer” meant but it compelled me to want to watch the film. As I researched more film posters I saw that many of them had a tagline. I concluded that adding a tagline to my poster would be a very good idea to attract my demographic.

The simplicity of this poster helped me understand more of what the film was about without giving too much or giving the wrong information away. Many of the best film posters were very simple ideas or images and though I was at a disadvantage having novice to intermediate experience in Photoshop CC I felt better about having a very basic poster.

As you can see above, my tagline says “They should never have returned…” which links to the four students returning to their old school. But as the person viewing this poster would not know this prior to watching the film, I thought it was essential for pulling in an audience. Whether it be my demographic or not.

I included an ellipse as I thought it had that added effect of mysteriousness as if there was something more to what words were written. Making people curious about Curiosity. I positioned it just below

the title of my film as I felt it looked better in that position and also, when reading text you tend to look downwards. As my title was very central and not skewed to the left or to the right I felt that my tagline would look out of place if centred left or right, like the American Beauty poster, so I decided to position it in the middle to add to the continuity of my magazine.

As I was researching, I found this film poster listed in the “top 25 movie posters of all time” this bewildered me as it was such an ordinary poster. But as I analysed the poster more I saw that the ordinary-ness of the film poster is what made it spectacular as it associated with the name of the film and the concept. However, that’s not the main reason to why I was influenced by this poster.http://www.creativebloq.com/movies/iconic-movie-posters-712378

Jurassic park, 1993. Usually directors and writers are hardly ever appreciated when it comes to films and TV dramas. However, for the likes of Quentin Valentino and Steven Spielberg it is another story. I think a factor to why they are always so memorable is not only due to their brilliant work but also due to their signature being left on their creations. Above, though faint, it says “ A STEVEN SPIELBERG FILM” this illustrates the techniques used by directors such as Spielberg to make sure they are acknowledged for their work, whether it be good or bad. I had never noticed this technique till now.

Here, I decreased the font size for the letter “A” and the word “FILM” to allow my name to stand out. I decided to copy the techniques used in the Jurassic Park, 1993 by the more well-known directors, such as Spielberg, to ‘establish’ my fictional career as a director and also to add to the authenticity of my film poster. The more conventions I added the more progress I could see I made from the beginning, where all I had was a pair of shoes taken by my iPhone 5s camera to a very realistic ‘Hollywood-esque’ film poster.

Warm Bodies, 2013 I decided to analyse a recent film to see the difference between the late 20th century film posters and the early 21st Century.

This film poster is influenced by social media websites. The use of a hash tag is associated with Twitter and now newly Facebook. This a tactic to gain recognition and popularity amongst the younger generation, which is the demographic of this particular film. I thought it was a very good idea to adjust a film poster to new surroundings which meant the creation of new film poster conventions. Now, many of the new films have hash tags specifically for their film which is either the name of the film or links to it.

There is a date on this film poster, however, it does not include the year of the film. I found that to be a very good idea as it doesn’t make the film look out-dated and almost has a timeless effect to it. But I found this film poster to be too much as I my attention was panning at different section of the film poster.

As my demographic ranges primarily between 15-18 I thought I would copy the convention used in many of the recent film posters by adding a hash tag that loosely links to my film and is somewhat catchy. As the hash tag has to be something memorable.

Not only film posters used the convention of a hash tag. TV dramas, film, adverts and music videos all use this convention. This shows the affect “#” can have on mass media.

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