Codes and Conventions of

Poster’s

By Priya Shroff

Movie TitlesNearly every single post has a the movie title on the poster to tell the audience what the movie is called.

The font and colours used in the title has to be clear but can be a way of letting the audience know what kind of genre the movie is.

For example, the title ‘orphan’ is written in a sketch as if it was the child who wrote it, it also gives a quite dark sensation to the movie. Gnomeo & Juliet’s title is quite humorous making it seem like not only a children's movie as it have lots of bright colours but also a comedy movie.

No Movie Titles

In very rare cases, when movies are well established and well-known like Harry Potter on the promotional posters they may not need to have the titles. This shows how everyone knows about the movie and is aware about what it is about. There is a tagline, which says ‘IT ALL ENDS’ which is at the bottom of both posters, which shows that it is the last movie and it entices the audience in to watch it as they want to know what’s going on and what happens at the end.

Every poster has a release date or one that says ‘Coming soon’. This tells the audience when to be going to see the movie and if not out then they can research about it .

Both of these movies have release dates of July and both these dates are at the bottom of the posters, so it doesn’t take up too much space.

Tag lines are used on most posters. The happy feet poster’s tag line say ‘warning: may cause toe-tipping’ this is a bit of a play on words as the title is about feel which tells audience there may be some dancing involved.

There are a list of cast member on some of movie poster, mostly if the movie consists of well-known actors and actresses.

Release dates

Taglines and cast and crew

In these two posters, the studio names are shown, Disney and DreamWorks animation. This shows the audience who created the movie and if there are other well-known movies by the same studios they may be as good as this one.

Film posters always contain an image, most of the time it’s the main image which the audiences know the film for. They are mainly still images either from the movie or pictures taken aside from the movie in a studio. Sometime these images reveal the movie’s genre and something about the movie. Images on posters need to be clear and appealing to the eye so that audience will want to know more about it or them and watch the movie.

Main Images