Film poster second drafts - Elliott

Having finally taken the actor photos for our short film, this is what my first poster draft looks like with our pics replacing the stock photos we used as placeholders, as well as a few other small changes. SWEEeeeeEEEEt. I think this came out insanely well so its a bit hard to be critical of myself but I'll give it a go.

Photo before being separated from backdrop

Unfortunately (for me of course) I couldn't afford to buy a professional green screen when we started shooting which meant that each of the three actor shots is taken against a normal wall.

This meant one (goddamn long) boring hour getting the photos rotoscoped and usable- one hour per photo that is. Whenever any photo is done like this there is always a white outline left around the edge of the pic, I tried to minimize this as much as possible, but then decided it could make an interesting design feature: Therefore I decided to leave the top-left outline to make the actors pop out from the black backing (especially because we all have dark hair) and this looks awesome.

I used a lot of colour correction (which I'm now getting nice and practiced at) because without it the pictures looked very amateur and, frankly, looked odd. By dropping saturation, brightness and upping contrast on different parts of the body I could create the very cool effect you see in the above photo. noice.

This is another draft I made (not based on of the first ideas.) I decided to bring this forward because of how cool the shot looked after filming and editing, and also because none of my groups posters were landscape (which apparently is easier to work with). Despite how cool the main photo looks in this poster I much prefer the overall design of my other poster so that is the one I will be taking forward.

I found it very hard to utilise the dead space on this layout which probably shows in the cramped quote in the top-right, and getting the bill block to stand out against black beard and white suit also proved impossible without making it two-tone (something that is never done in the industry) - despite that look at how DAMN COOL that shot looks.

Refinement of my poster idea [Keelan]

After posting my poster idea on the blog, I have had feedback from my teachers and my peers. It has arisen that that title was not large enough to be noticeable. Also, the tagline may be misinterpreted as the title of the film. Therefore, I have moved the tagline to where the cast titles were, and moved the cast titles up. I have also enlarged the title.
I also noticed, that in comparison to most film posters, the billing block at the bottom is not long enough. Therefore, I stretched it out. We still have yet to take pictures of the characters, which we will do tomorrow.

Film Poster Idea [Keelan]

My first poster design for the short film follows general conventions of the industry. For this one I decided to create a portrait poster. Even though both in class and during my own research I have found that it is harder to do so due to the fact there is less dead space to play with, I thought I'd still give it a go.

(The Bourne Legacy Movie Poster)

The idea, I got from another film poster I had previously seen, this being The Bourne Legacy. As you can see I have closely followed the way that the blank space has been used. However, The Bourne poster that I was using to get my idea from was not an the main advertisement for the movie, which we know as it contains no billing block.


The male character is an image from a royalty free stock image website, I have used this as we have not yet photographed the cast from out short film. When we do so, I intend to replace the image with the main character of our film (Ziaul Islam).

The font I decided on using was Nikodecs, which I gained access to via Dafont. I set the tracking on all of the text I created to -25, this allows all of the individual characters to be closer together, making it look even more like a real movie poster.
For the text containing the main cast member names I set the leading to 22.42pt. This brought the upper and lower lines of text closer together, showing that they were grouped together.

The billing block was a template produced by Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot. When it comes to creating our official poster I will create a specific one for it. I did not do this for the design idea as I do not currently have all the relevant information.

When actually creating the poster, I did not use a template or guide, which is probably noticeable from some shapes and pieces of text that may not be perfectly in place. When creating the official poster I will take extra time and attention to making sure everything is perfect.

Film Poster Draft - Ziaul

This is my poster for our film. This is not going to be the background picture because we haven't shot a legit photo as of yet. However we want a similar style photo for the actual poster in my opinion. The block production is random as well because we don't know all the music we have in our film. I chose to have just me as the poster background and the only name because I am the main character and the film is based on my character. I opted for this style mainly due to the fact of it being a dark scene, it is quite mysterious and can't see the man's face. I opted against using quotes and ratings for this poster. I used Paint.Net for this poster.

This was the movie poster before it got edited. I didn't know how to get rid of the random huge sign that took up most of the photo but fortunately Elliott helped me as he knew how to edit it out and this made a better, more improved poster because of it.

Film poster idea draft - Elliott

click to enlarge

My draft idea for the short film's movie poster, Showing some of the industry conventions. Because we have not yet taken high quality photos of our actors I instead used public domain images that were very similar to what the final pictures will look like. I could have used screenshots from the video footage but that would have involved rotoscoping (tracing) out each character and would have taken far to much time compared to the stock pics which show the idea just as well.

I have also not set up the billing block because I do not have all the details (such as music used or production company name) and rewriting it will be very easy when I do, thanks to the template produced by Video Copilot (they also do great AE plug-ins.)

As a base start for the poster- and, crucially, to get the correct poster dimensions- I started with this film poster for The Dark Knight. Hopefully there is not any visible influence from this in the completed draft. One poster I have taken influence from, however is the simple black on white text style from 'Submarine' which was one of the film posters I analysed for research. Unfortunately because this is a full length film and mine is not, I could not think of as many applicable review companies as Richard Ayoade's poster had (having 4 star reviews and one quote is, I think, the optimal amount for this poster idea) leaving an under-utilization of dead space at the top of my poster.

This was the guide I used, and which turned out to be very annoying to make. The lines helped in making sure that all components of the poster were justified correctly and that all text remained within the crucial 'safe zone' which can be cut off by printing/framing. The red guidelines show the side margins and the first split of the poster (into horizontal thirds.) This way I can keep all reviews in the top third and titling/billing block etc. in the bottom third. The purple and green guides help insure the reviews are central by cutting the review section into quarters. 

James Bond Casino Royale - Ziaul

This is the main poster of James Bonds Casino Royale. As you can tell their are two images but the more visible one is Daniel Craig. This is because he is the main character but also Daniel Craig attracts a fan base, many people watch James Bond because of him. The main audience is for males of the age of 12-15, it is an action/ thriller film which you would associate with this age group and gender. However this movie poster might attract females as well as most might see him as eye candy. The second main photo is that of a transparent female with smaller images within it. The women and the smaller images are what this film is all about but fitted it the transparent women because no more room wanted to be taken up. The background is a grey colour which means that all the other colours on it are quite visible including the title. The other most visible text is the date of release too show the audience when the film is coming out. Physiologically it is smart as people who read it will go to watch it mainly as it's second most visible text on the poster.
There is a lot of dead space in the top left which is not used by any images or other designs.. some may say it is a poor poster because of so much dead space in the corner.

Poster Research (Awaydays) - Elliott

This movie wasn't super great but it has Stephen Graham from Snatch in it so all good

This poster features 6 different images of the main and secondary characters from the film composited into the top two-thirds of the poster with almost all of the text contained to the bottom third.

I actually think this is a terrible movie poster because of the huge amount of dead space and the way that the images look like they've been print-screened off the actual film footage (very bad job of cutting them from the background) the use of masses of bright yellow to give some impact is also a very cheap design choice.

Poster Research (Submarine) - Elliott

sick film bro

To match the type of film I am producing I have chosen to analyse the film posters of small or independent British films. Ideally I would examine the features of other short films, however in the industry it is very uncommon for films that aren't feature length to produce a poster.

Unusually for a small film the very top object on the poster is the names of actors. This is irregular because actors in this film type are usually little-known and therefore will not have a following that will see movies just because they are in it, This is especially true with the actors in this film who were uknowns cast in their first film roles.

"you Ayo-what mate?"

Poster Research - Fish Tank [Keelan]

The second poster that I have researched is 'Fish Tank', which was released in 2009.

Poster Research - The Disappearance of Alice Creed [Keelan]

For the Poster research we have to do research into film posters that fall into the category of film that we are making (British, independent and low budget). As a group we have to research into 12 film posters, working out to having a task of 4 each. In these posts we will have to discuss things such as the graphics, layout and conventions of the posters. As well as that we will also have to discuss how the poster applies the five main concepts.

My first piece of research into this is of the film poster 'The Disappearance of Alice Creed', this was released in 2009.