Steps To Creating Our Film Poster.

Poster Analysis:

The movie poster is a key point in the marketing of a film. Its largely responsible for the attracting of the target audience. With this in mind we decided to create a set of posters which was both visually striking and followed the conventions of modern horror films. The poster for the movie “1408” was major inspiration for us. When creating the poster we felt we needed to capture the feel of the movie itself and also appeal to our TMG. After we had created numerous options we decided on one final poster.

Step One
of creating the poster consisted of capturing images which gave the viewer a good idea about the film itself. Visually the film is very dark and there are a lot of browns and blacks. So an image which conveyed this was important. As the film is about the “Red Room” we felt that a visualisation of this on the poster would be better than a visualisation of protagonist. We took a camera into the set and set about taking pictures. We framed them so the dominant side of the poster (the left) had the most eye capturing point. The lighting was very important, we wanted to create a strong idea of good against bad and the unknown. (This is best shown in poster 3) this involved casting areas of the room in the back ground in dark light and having the central points in the poster which conveyed the room in light. To make the “Red” in “Red Room” stand out (an early idea in the poster making process was to have the red in red room in a bright red so it stood out against the blandness of the background, also the colour red connotes anger and rage which is a major plot point in the film) also the browns and blacks keep continuity with film itself. We also wanted to follow conventions, films such as the “Amityville Horror” and “1408” show the setting of the scary events, thus we decided to stick to these conventions and do the same.

Step Two
involved choosing the fonts and colours, after deciding to put the “Red” in “Red Room” in bright red, we wanted to find colours which would work well with it. White stands out against the darker background and also connotes purity against the anger in the red. The fonts themselves were very important. Conventionally fonts on posters have always been linked into the film. With this in mind we went about choosing a font which suited the look of the film and the artistic direction of set. The colours and the design of the set were chosen to make it look dated and old. After all it is an old woman’s house. Therefore we decided to pick a font which also connoted this. “Blacktalkserif BTN” suited this perfectly it looked old enough to be in a old woman’s house yet not so old it looked period.

Step Three
finally and technically the layout of the poster was very important. It was important to make use of the rules of poster conventions. The three big things that were essential in the poster were the line of the eye, the rule of thirds and the POA. We tried to follow each of these on all of the possible posters we made. Another convention of posters which felt was important to include was the cast and credits section at the bottom. Conventionally the section uses the same fonts and the rest of the poster. See in depth analysis of the separate posters for more: