Plans For Poster & Magazine Review Page

Whilst Tom has been working on posts relating to Target Audience and Editing Techniques, and I have been finishing the Animatic and looking at issues of Representation, we have also been discussing ideas for our ancillary products; a poster for our short film, and a magazine review page featuring our film. Here are some of the basic layout designs I have drawn, along with explanatory notes.

Our film is about a person acting selflessly; a person who has an effect on others, but is not noticed or recognised by them, so I thought it would be good to convey this kind of message in the poster. My idea, as shown above, was to have a simple, geometric collage of many ordinary portrait shots, with the subject in each staring directly into the camera. They would all be around the same age as the protagonist, just as the characters in the film are, and the portraits would all be taken with a bright, airy background so that the person's outline stands out. Just beneath and to the right of the film's title (which we have yet to decide on), however, one of the photos will contain the same kind of blurred background as all of the other photos, but will not contain a subject. The appeal of this poster would firstly be in the stare of the subjects captured in the portraits; hopefully, this will unnerve people enough to look more closely at the poster and discover what it is advertising. The missing subject in one of the portraits will also hopefully add a sense of intrigue, so that the consumer remains curious about the film and its premise for a long time after seeing the poster.

Below is another layout design suggested by Tom on the basis of the first. The core idea of the missing subject is retained, but the setting of the school/college is conveyed with the portraits being printed on a yearbook, and the yearbook being laid upon a desk. I like this idea, but I am aware that this poster will be considerably more difficult to create.

In preparation for the magazine review page, I have been browsing through various film and cinema magazines, both in physical form and online. Although there are quite a number of magazines that allow consumers to view short films either online or via a DVD, there are surprisingly few that regularly offer actual reviews of short films. Therefore, our magazine review page will have to look like a special feature within that specific issue of the magazine, or like a first-time introduction to a new section of the magazine.

Film magazines such as Empire and Total Film generally contain one or two large reviews that span two or three pages each, for popular or critically anticipated films, and these are followed by smaller reviews: a few that take up a single page each (for films that are less critically anticipated, but still popular), more that take up half a page (for semi-popular films), and even more that take up around an eighth of a page (for any other films). To keep the reader interested, these different sized reviews are combined on the page, but with the general trend being from pages covered in long reviews with large images, down to pages filled with small reviews with a single, small images. 

Tom and I have decided that our review should be either the small 'eighth of a page' or medium 'half a page' size, within a page featuring other short-film reviews. Above is a basic sketch of what the page could look like.