Film Poster

When researching film posters part of what you are looking for is how it communicates the brand of the film and how it is unified with the trailer and magazine cover.... but part of it is also just getting ideas for your own poster.

So here's how to completely rip off an existing idea (no one will ever know hee hee!).

I was sitting at one of the Macs in H120 trying to think of what makes a good poster. The answer was staring me in the face - literally. I was looking at the poster for Capote on the wall right in front of me, which I think is actually a DVD cover - it doesn't really matter for the purpose of this post, but it looks something like this:

So I searched for an image of a man in a similar pose. You will have to use your own photography, but doing a quick search this is what I found:

Then I thought - I need a background.... I wanted to get that same low horizon idea from the Capote poster and after a bit of searching I found this:

This was perfect because it stes up a kind of blue colour scheme. Here's the resulting poster with some notes:

This took me about an hour including all the searching and downloading.... if it was all original photography it would get an A... but probably not full marks - even copying real media will only get you so far. It's a bit blank and could be cleverer.

You should start thinking about your film and print work.

Come see me for more detail on how to achieve these effects.

THE BRIEF

Present a promotion package for a new film which includes

1. A teaser trailer (30-90 seconds) - (40 marks – group production)
2. A Film Magazine cover featuring your film (10 marks – individual production)
3. A Poster for your film (10 marks – individual production)

As usual you also have to present planning and research on a blog (20 marks) and an evaluation (20 marks)./ Both of these MUST be done individually. The best place to start is looking at teaser trailers.

DON'T plan on making a full theatrical trailer, which can be anything from 2 - 4 minutes - because that is not what the brief asks for. Teaser trailers can be very creative. They sometimes don't even feature any footage from the film. They often just raise awareness of a film in a clever way. A classic example of a teaser is this one for The Dark Knight done with sound-bites from the film and graphics.
Another creative way of raising film awareness - especially for a highly anticipated "movie event" such as Prometheus is to shoot extra footage (not intended for the film) in order to present mini-stories based on the audience's expectations of the narrative.... What does that mean?... First look at the tradition style teaser trailer for Prometheus. It cuts film footage together with a new sound track to make the film appear very exciting...

Now look at these two "virals" for the same film. A viral is a short film you hope will be passed around and shared by your fanbase, spreading in the fashion of a virus. This is a very cheap means of distribution - it doesn't cost anything, unlike a TV commercial. The trick is to make the teaser something unusual and creative... something worthy of passing on to a friend. These two teasers don't feature any footage from the film:


Fine - you may say - but you will not be able to produce anything like this as it would take a huge budget... so have a look at this example. This is the kind of thing you could easily produce... First look at the full theatrical trailer for this American Indie film Blue Ridge


Now observe how this is turned into a shorter more stylised teaser:
You should look at lots of trailers to get an idea what you want to produce. A good place to start is this website - http://www.traileraddict.com.As usual you should start a blog to record all your research. In the title have some combination of your name and G324 Advanced Portfolio.