Research - Film poster

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Research – Film Posters By Callum Mitchell

Transcript of Research - Film poster

Page 1: Research - Film poster

Research – Film Posters

By Callum Mitchell

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Initial thoughts.

Researching film posters was an exiting topic for me due to the fact at this very moment I am in the process of designing a poster for a professional film so not only did I have to research posters and see generic conventions for our media project but also I had to do it for the professional feature film I am designing for. Firstly I looked into a professional feature film poster to see what that looks like. I had a choice of a few different high quality successful films but I chose a specific poster that I loved the design of which was "The Dark Knight Rises". This was the first poster that I analyzed.

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First posterThis was the poster I analysed and straight from the get go you can see that it is a well designed poster and of high quality. I decided to break the poster down further.

I found that the poster contains:• A picture of the main character• The main actors names• The logo• The film title• A background image• The release date• The companies that created and produced

the film• The main cast and crew involved• A slogan

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The next thing I wanted to do was look at these in detail. I looked at the poster and analysed it from a graphic designers point of view and I decided to split it up into three different parts (image above). First you have the subject of the poster. This is often the main character. In this case it is 'Batman' this can also be maybe a logo or in our case a lottery ticket. It can be anything that is the subject of the film but the point is that that stays in the center of the poster as that is what the producers want you to focus on. The importance of this is to make it stand out. The image is either generated or just high quality because it is a focal point.

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First poster thoughts.I found that this professional poster followed a certain set of guidelines and that everything is set out in a specific order with the:• Background• Main character/subject• Logo/film name• Slogan/actorsI decided that I wanted to see if any other film posters followed these similar guidelines. I wanted to look into the different types of films including short films and low budget films.

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Second posterThe second poster I looked into was a short film poster, just one I found off Google. I didn’t want to do any research into the short film but just analyse the poster.

Again, this poster contained:• A picture of the main character• The logo• The film title• A background image• The companies that created and

produced the film• The main cast and crew involved• A slogan

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Text at the top again telling you what the film is. The text itself doesn’t really have much relevance but it’s the positioning it what matters.

The main character (or supposedly) is in the center of the image again for something to focus on.

Again there is a background image, setting the scene of the film and giving it a colour foundation.

There is the title of the film (name) to tell you what the film is and shows the logo and style of the film designs.

The generic cast and crew display in the same way as they are displayed In all the other film posters. They all have this presented in the same way.

Finally the website is displayed which I haven’t seen on the feature films however the short films kind of need to for the publicity.

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Third posterAfter speaking to the director, I decided to go ahead and make the poster for the short film I am designing for. I came up with this poster and it does have similar aspects to the other poster that I have researched however we don’t have a main character focus. This is because we didn’t have an image that wasn’t blurry so we had to make do with what we had so I decided to blur out the whole background. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a focus point to the poster as there is the roman helmet however in terms of designing there isn’t an official focus of the poster. That being said, we do have the other things featured such as the generic cast and the title.

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Fourth PosterFor the final poster analysis I decided to look at the film poster we made last year and compare it to the existing professional posters I have already looked into. Bearing in mind before this poster was created, we hadn’t researched anything.

Our poster contains:• A main focal point• The logo• The film title• A background image• The companies that created and

produced the film• The main cast and crew involved

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Post-research thoughtsAfter a lot of research I have come to the conclusion that most film posters have similar rules and guidelines to follow. I have developed a diagram which I feel that is a template for all film posters to follow. This diagram is based on my research into film posters. Each poster should have some quote on the top or slogan of some kind and then has a main focus point in the center of the poster, the title of the film and the cast and crew involved in the film. All this should be set out in the similar way and must look professional. Personally I think that in our film poster we should abide by these rules and follow the rules of posters and the diagram I have created.

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Extra research

I then decided to do some further research into posters however these posters are a bit different. I stumbled across a website recently that was really interesting in terms of graphic design. The website publishes designs and designers takes on different designs. I found a page that had many clever graphically based takes on movie posters. The only problem with these is the fact that they are mainly art based rather than computer graphics. I really like some of these adaptions of feature film posters and I feel that it might be interesting to maybe make a version of our film poster in this style to see how it looks.