Movie poster research

A film poster is a poster used to promote and advertise a film. Studios often print several posters

that vary in size and content for various domestic and international markets. They normally contain an

image with text. Today's posters often feature photographs of the main actors. Prior to the 1990s,

illustrations instead of photos were far more common. The text on film posters usually contains the film title in large lettering and often the names of the main actors. It may also include a tagline, the name of

the director, names of characters, the release date, etc.

In our process of making the film, we decided that we wanted to go down certain paths of film making and one was distribution, we had already created a Facebook page to advertise and distribute information on the page, we wanted to

add to the creative side of our movie opening, as wed didn’t have any extreme makeup or costume in the film so we needed a way to outsource this creativity and that is how we came up with the idea o creating our own movie poster.

When creating the poster I conducted some research beforehand, looking certain fields of horror movies and then finding their movie posters, I collected a wide range and I analysed each one to see what I needed to include in my own poster. I learnt that conventionally horror movies have their monster etc. on the front of their movie poster. I began to understand

that this was a way of giving the audience some insight into the horror movie and what to expect, and I realised that I didn’t want to do that, because the main aspect in our movie opening is the ambiguity of what happens. So then I

continued researching and began to find many movie posters with the main characters on and this is basically the path I chose to go down. I wanted to capture the secrecy that was perfected in these movie posters, for example the woman in black, case 39 and scream. I began to understand that the type of horror movie that me and Abbie were creating was like these posters, the posters that use their main monster on the front gives the audience a sense of fear as they know what is going to be in the film the things provoke fear and it creates a sort of adrenaline to know what they are facing. However

the other posters with the main characters on the front, show the audience through the colour, the lighting, the composition, the costume etc. that there is something lurking, they do goad the audience into thinking that there is

something lingering in the background, something they should fear; and this is what I wanted to achieve, the sense that something is there. It was also interesting for me to have to try and emulate thins, only communicated through lighting

and composition etc. and it was a challenge but I did allow me to be able to understand our film a lot more.

TRIPPED? Is our title and we decided to use this title in the end because we felt that it perfectly compressed all the detail that we wanted to give the audience and also it links correctly to the ending of our movie opening and I believe without it the ending would be a bit more vague, but this question shows even more that something happened to the girl and it wasn’t something normal

I decided on the tagline ‘watch your step’ as I felt that it triggered the correct amount of reaction from people, as it sends out a clear warning but also with it directly linked with the title as it does seem like a threat and to me creates a real sense of fear and makes me want to look behind me.

In the end I decided to use this photo/ composition. We chose to take this positioning for the movie poster as we believed that it linked everything together and emphasised the key points that we wanted it to, showing that the main area in the movie opening was Alice falling down the stairs and why she did, the photo shows the hesitation from Alice and again the audience see this in the movie opening when Alice stops and hesitates before falling. The position of the feet shows this, the slight way they are hanging just a tiny bit over the edge.

Dark atmosphere, muted saturation, selected change in contrast. Provokes emotions of fear, confusion, intrigue as you can’t quite see what's in the background