Friday, 10 February 2012

Creating Our Horror Poster

Along with film trailers, posters are needed to help sell the film to a wide audience and get people to see it. So when it came to making our horror movie trailer it was only natural that we had to create a poster to go along with it. The poster it's self had to relate to the trailer/film in some way (e.g. text, image or colour) and had to follow the conventions of the posters we have researched in order to make the poster look as good as possible. 

The first thing my group and I decided on is that the poster was going to be a 'single image black background poster' since based on the research we conducted, the overall feedback was that these types of posters were the most favourable (especially in my case) since the bold colouring of the image against the dark background, mixed with the simplicity of the image helps to catch the audiences’ eye and also it doesn’t give away anything major about the film which avoids the possibility of spoilers. The main inspiration for the poster was the poster for 'John Carpenters Halloween' since that poster is one of the best film posters ever made (at least I think it is) and a lot of the conventions used in our poster came from 'Halloween'. 



The first stage in making our poster was to make the size of the poster A4 and decide on a single image to be used in the poster that relates to our film (just a side note here is that we used Photoshop to create our poster since it was a program that my group and I were familiar using  so everyone could work on the poster in there own time and the program itself was ideal for creating a film poster since we could manipulate images and text in various ways like colour orientation, size, effects etc). We eventually decided on using a cross turned upside down since it is the symbol of the devil and the trailer we made is about devil possession. Once we had imported it into Photoshop we changed it's size so that it took up a large chunk of the poster and then alerted the hue/saturation to give the cross and dark red look to it since it was originally gold and the colour red symbolises fear, angry, blood, death etc. 



Afterwards we added a glow effect onto the cross to give it even more power and helped it to stand out greatly from the black background (plus it looked cool). So now that the image was finished we moved on to the extra details need for the poster since the image alone isn't enough, in this case the next thing we did was to add the production credits from the end of our trailer onto the poster since it's a convention used by every film poster (or at least 97% of them) and it shows who was behind the making of the film. To do this we simply copied the image from the trailer video and then resized it so that it fit into the space provided at the bottom. The reason we did this instead of typing out the text one by one is that the text was already aligned and didn't need much changing after we imported it and that this technique was used by various other media groups (including the year before us) so we didn't feel like we were being lazy or anything.  




Next we had to add the title of our film to the poster and for constancies sake we took the title text used in the trailer and put it into the poster... however the text really didn't go with the poster and because of that we than realised that we had to find a brand new text font that could be used in both the poster and the trailer. Naturally we looked on various font websites like 'dafont.com' but even though we did find some fonts that worked in one of the media products the same font didn't work in the other. At first we thought that we were screwed since we couldn't find any fonts that worked on both products but then we decided to take a simpler approach and look through the default fonts available in Photoshop and Microsoft word. Finally we fond a font that worked in both the trailer and the poster and it was from Microsoft word of all places, the font was called ' Basic Sans Heavy SF' (don't know what SF means) and it was a very bold font that wasn't too sharp or too rounded. The font looked a lot like 'Halloween's' text font and after importing the font into Photoshop we added an inner and outer glow to the text to give a nice white outline which made it stand out  more from the background and it gave it a more three dimensional effect. 





Our final step was to add the extra text and certificate rating. The extra text was just the tagline for the film since Horror movies LOVE taglines (ours being "from her past, comes a new evil") and the pull quote from a critic, since its something that modern posters love to do because it makes the film look better which means that more people which watch it. For the certificate rating we chose to used the 18 rating since most horror films are rated 18 and it shows that we are attracting teenagers and young adults which is what are target audience is meant to be. In order to get the image into Photoshop we imported it from the internet and then we had to highlight the white box area of the image using the magic wand tool and remove it so that all that was left was the 18 certificate.



So that's how we made our poster and I’m very happy with how it turned out since it follows the conventions of the typical movie poster but follows the style of single image black background posters (which are arguably the best type of film poster) and because of this the poster look very bold in terms of colour and imagery and the simplistic design of the poster gives the audience the general idea of the film but it doesn’t give away anything major, which is just what a film poster should do.  

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