Poster Ideas



For one of two ancillary tasks we need to complete, I have chosen -- along with the rest of my group -- to produce a poster for our film noir short. I have experimented with and mocked up a couple of posters using Adobe Fireworks CS5 to see what works and what doesn't.



fig. 1



Figure 1 is a mock-up of a pretty typical theatrical release poster for a film. The text on the poster is minimalist, detailing the names of the principal actors and release date alongside the title of the film. I used this shot to introduce the titular 'correspondent', Robyn, who is looking directly at the camera (direct address) to grab the viewer's attention. Jade also features in the poster, placed behind Robyn: the look on her face suggests she plays a smaller, if still important, role than Robyn does. The contrasting nature of the characters we would hope to make the viewer question how the two of them are involved.



fig. 2



Figure 2 is more indicative of a teaser poster. There is less writing on this poster than in the theatrical poster mock-up (fig. 1), and the face of the character depicted is not shown. This still was taken on-location at Reality Checkpoint, Cambridge, during the shooting of Scene III. It is colour-corrected to how we wish the final film to look, and this coupled with the low shot and pose of Robyn hints at subterfuge et cetera. I also wanted to see how the inclusion of a tagline might work or not work. I decided to go for "Read all about it." as a darkly humourous play on a well-known archaic phrase shouted by newspaper boys in the 19th and 20th centuries: it further suggests the film, or events within, are worth reading about.

The font I used for these two posters was Book Antiqua. I like this serif font as it looks quite newspaper-like but I will keep looking to see if I can find a more suitable one.