Poster for a Short Film: Semiotics

Alongside our main production of a Short Film, Tom and I must produce two related ancillary products, and for these we have chosen to make a Magazine Review and a Poster for our film. Whilst Tom handles the preparatory research for the Review, I will be doing the same for the Poster.

For me, the first logical step is to ask: What is a poster? (i.e., What are its constituents, and what is its purpose?) Well, in answer, a poster is a placard or bill intended for display in a public place for the purposes of advertising. To fulfill this purpose, posters usually contain information about a particular event or product, and they present this information in an appealing or interesting way, so that people who view the poster will be encouraged to attend the event or purchase the product.

In essence, then, a poster is a thin piece of material that represents something other than itself, and it does this by carrying information in the form of images and text. In other words, the poster acts as a sign, and this is where semiotics becomes relevant. I began to explore semiotics last year with an introductory post, and I have summarised the main points of the post below:

• Semiotics is basically an area of study looking at signs as a means of communication.
• Signs are made up of two elements, the Signifier and the Signified;
• The Signifier is the material of which the sign is composed (text, images, sounds, etc)
• The Signified is the concept that the Signifier alludes to.
• The links between Signifiers and the Signified are culturally relative. (i.e., identical Signifiers may may allude to different concepts in different cultures)

In the same post, I concluded that, 'The media industry use signs because they are an efficient way of expressing a large amount of information with very little material.' Although I was writing with regard to mise-en-scene and cinematographic style at the time, it has since occurred to me that the same is true of any kind of advertisement, including posters. 

Whilst it would be unnecesary to delve deep into the rabbit-hole of aggregatory academia that calls itself 'semiotics,' I am sure that an understanding of the importance of semiotics will result in a more structured and rigorous approach to our poster's production. There are three distinct branches of semiotics, and each is relevant to a different aspect of our poster:


Semantics

This is what semiotics is most commonly known for, and what I breifly explained above: the relationship between signs and what they stand for (Signifiers and the signified). It is fairly obvious that we must create a poster that clearly links to our short film; otherwise, all purpose of the poster is lost! The method behind the link between film and poster, though, is less obvious. In order to build a clear relationship between all of our products, we must craft a distinct visual style that is highly recogniseable. One possible way of acheiving this would be to have an image of the film's protagonist on the poster, as illustrated in this poster for Inception, showing an image of Leonardo DiCaprio with his name clearly printed at the top.




Syntactics
This branch deals with the formal or structural relationships between signs. In order to create a film poster that does its intended job, it must be recogniseable as a film poster, which means it will need to contain the common, defining elements present in all good film posters. I will ensure that this is so by analysing a range of film posters to find out what conventions are adhered to, and why.

Pragmatics
Pragmatics is all about the relationship between signs and interpreters. The concept of cultural relativism that I mentioned above, for example, would fall under this label, because culture is something that exists in the mind of the interpreter. In our particular case, the sign is a film poster, and the interpreters are our target audience. In general, the study of pragmatics illustrates the importance of context; it shows that what a sign signifies is largely dependent upon the way it is viewed (i.e., at what time? In what place? By whom?). To a certain extent, we can control the audience our poster appeals to by emulating successful posters that have previously targeted the same audience, but in doing this we risk representing our short film as something that is just as unoriginal as our poster. The only other accurate way of building a targeting strategy is through audience research, where we can directly ask consumers what appeals to them, and subsequently discover what posters they are most receptive to.

In summary, each branch of semiotics highlights an aspect that is fundamental to the success or failure of a film poster in fulfilling its purpose, and it would be frankly foolish to prepare and produce a poster without giving the field of semiotics any serious

consideration.

UPDATE: Here is Tom's post briefly analysing the pragmatic and syntactic conventions of film posters.