Evaluation of my Media Studies film poster By Stefan Demosthenous

Introduction I created this poster for my coursework portfolio, and have used all my own images to create this magazine. I used Adobe Photoshop software to create my poster. I looked at other posters both, with similar genre to my film, and then quite a few with various different genres. By looking at these professional products, I attained the generic structures that are associated with posters, which meant that when creating my poster, I was able to use these assets to enhance the look of my product.

Title I positioned the title of my film at the top of my poster, as it would hopefully be the first thing audiences would read once looking at my poster. I used a font that had a gothic / mysterious look to it, as I wanted the audience to try and gain information into the genre and theme of the film. I chose the for the title to be in the colour of white, as it would stand out the most against the predominantly black background, on which it is positioned on. This is to give it more emphasis and just stand out more.

Previous Credits Used very often by film posters all around the world, is mentioning the who the film is created by, using meaning the director, which is no different in my case. Posters state this so that audiences know roughly what to expect when they watch that film. Also if the audience like their previous films, that will be engaged more to the poster and the film, and evidentially more likely to go watch the film.

Positive quotes and ratings A very popular film poster convention is having critics comments and ratings on the poster, and only positive reviews. Additionally the people or company reviewing your film, has to have relevance to the target audience that the film is trying to attract. So as our film is aimed at the younger audience, we have included a review from a critic who writes for Empire magazine, which is a film magazine that is aimed at all ages really, starting from about 10 upwards. It is a very straight forward, and easy reading film magazine.

Colour Saturation The colour pallet I have used is predominantly red white and black. This is very traditionally to many horror and gothic film posters. Having the poster seemingly very dark and bright, the look of the film should be clear to the audience, expecting to see scenes of darkness and contrasting light. The colour red, indicates danger, and the thought of that maybe something terrible could happen within the film.

Positioning and body language of characters Having the main character of the poster staring straight towards the audience, engages them, and makes them feel as if she is looking at them, and thus feeling involved in the film. The mere lake of emotion in her face, extents the fact that she is the antagonist and could be seem to be un-effected by anything she has to do to achieve her goal. The character situated below the main picture, is shown to be helpless, and as she is far smaller character, feel automatically think she is in direct danger from the other character, because she is far smaller in size. The body language also indicates to us that she is worried or scared. Also the triangular shape of the main character in the poster, is very generic for film posters.

Lighting The fact that the bottom character is wearing a white, and the top character is shown in very dark lighting and makeup, the audience should relate the darkness to bad, and light to good. The shine of light that is just appearing above the small character in white, should hopefully give the audience a sense that the story could end happily, as she is heading towards the light, and not into darkness. Most of the poster is in black, which makes the text and other light images stand out even more, and attract audiences eye lines to a greater extent.

Tagline ‘Sometimes fairytales are not so perfect’. The tagline is in the same font as the title of the film to continue continuity of font throughout the poster. The tagline intrigues the audience, as for hat they have seen maybe before, where the majority of fairytales end happily, this one is set out to be the opposite, and so would intrigue them to see how this film plays out.

Text I have used in total three different fonts throughout my poster, to keep consistency. With one of the fonts only being used in some of the small writing at the bottom of the poster. I have made the two main actress’s names nearly as big as the title, as from looking at professional posters, a lot of the time the main actor or actress’s names are the same size if not bigger then the title itself. Generically they have their last names in bigger font as well.

Credits / Billing block The billing block and credits located at the bottom of the page are another convention of professional film poster, as for the only posters I have seen without such things are teaser posters in some cases, but even then they usually have both these piece of information. It just states to the audience, all of the main people that are involve with that film, and the role they play making the film. Also the company logo’s show who has put up the money to fund the film.