Poster Production

As can be seen in my plans, the original ideas Tom and I had for the poster revolved around a 'school yearbook' kind of look; either with faces of students simply staring out of the poster, or with faces staring out of the photos within an actual yearbook laid upon a desk. The central concept was in showing the absence of a person by having one photo that doesn't contain a subject; one photo that shows the background alone, with no face. The purpose of this was to convey the predicament of our protagonist; he is always around, putting others before himself, but never receives any recognition or praise; he goes pretty much entirely unnoticed.

Whilst Tom liked the plan including the actual yearbook, I kept pushing the first plan, because, not only was the grid of photos clearly going to be simpler, I believed it would be more effective; the faces staring directly out were going to catch people's eyes and draw their attention straight to our film. So, with this in mind, Tom and I used part of Tuesday's lesson to take volunteers into the library and photograph their head and shoulders against the quintessential school photo backdrop: a bookshelf. Pleased with the amount of photos we had taken, I went home, slipped the SD card into my laptop, and started editing away with photoshop.

I placed all of the photographs onto the canvas in order to get an idea of what the final poster was going to look like. That's when it dawned on me: THIS LOOKS REALLY AWFUL.

 
All of the volunteers couldn't have been more helpful, and I want to make clear that the abandoning of this idea is no fault of theirs. The problem is, it just doesn't look like a poster. Good posters jump out, grab your attention, and refuse to leave your mind until you walk into that cinema and purchase that ticket. What you see above is banal and bland; more effective as a sedative than a stimulant. Our quantitative audience research revealed that what audiences most looked for in a poster was an eye-catching image and images of the characters or actors. So, not only was this poster not performing its general role, it was not performing the specific roles required for it to appeal to our target audience.

Being entirely unhappy with this design (as you can probably tell), I went away thinking deeply about new possiblities and variations, keeping in mind the criteria set by our by our audience research results. I began to reconsider what it was that stood out to me most about our film. The predicament of the protagonist is definitely at the core of our film, but this is difficult to convey in a single poster, and besides, our target audience would be more interested in watching the film if they were yet to discover the nature of the protagonist's situation. Finally, it occurred to me: what gives the film its identity on first impression is the title - PENUMBRA (click here for an explanation).

So, last night, with the title of the film at the forefront of my mind, I began to construct an entirely new poster. I explained the idea over the phone to Tom, and from this he drew his own mock-ups of how the poster could look. The first two images below show the initial experiments carried out in photoshop yesterday evening, and the rest are all from different stage in the poster's production today. Below each image is an explanatory caption.

Inspired by this poster for Inception, I put the title at an angle spanning most of the poster, and gave it the signature glow of our title (important because A- it looks cool, and B- it relates to the definition of penumbra as a part of a shadow). Then, using internet tutorials, I learned how to mask layers in such a way that images can appear within text. Our lead-actors eyes can be seen peering out from the forth stroke of the M.

Here, I was trying to see if it was possible to have an image show through more than one piece of text. Luckily, this process wasn't as difficult as I had expected.

This morning, in Media, the first thing I did was to create lots of text layers which i then transfromed and arranged to make an interesting collage.

I then grouped the text layers appropriately, then rasterized them and merged them so that different images (either from our film or relating to it) can be seen in different peices of text.

Deciding the images within the text were too busy with detailed colour, I made them all black and white, and this definitely had a positive effect in drawing more attention to the title. After discussing things with Tom, we decided it would be a good idea to have an outline of our protagonist in the bottom right-hand corner. I set about cutting a blurred image of our lead-actor out of a frame from our film, and once this was in the poster, both Tom and I agreed it looked better in full colour than as an outline alone.

Next, in an attempt to make the poster stand out more, I experimented with different hues of different intensity for the images in the text. Eventually, I decided that red was most attention grabbing, and most fitting for the theme of pain which is important in our film.

Finally, here (at full resolution, provided you click on the image) is our new poster! In this final stage, I increased the vibrancy and brightness of the colours in the image of our protagonist from the back, so that he is more visible against the solid black background. I also added some text (in the same font as the title for conguity) to specify that the poster is advertising a short film, and some other text to credit Tom and I as directors. (For the crediting font, I searched online to find fonts similar to those used for crediting in actual film posters, and then downloaded and installed one called 'Rothman' from this website)

Because I have literally just completed this poster this afternoon, Tom has yet to see it, and I have yet to ask anyone besides my parents for feedback on it. Therefore, this is by no means our final poster. Before we reach that stage, I will look at the poster with Tom to see what variations we can create - perhaps of a different style, or perhaps in the same style for different modes of exhibition - and we will show the poster to a lot more people in order to get some detailed qualitative feedback.