While choosing how to present our poster we took a look at other horror films and their posters. It seemed a general theme consisted of a black and white colour scheme, and sometimes with a hint of red.
Generally, the posters show a central image with a tag line that contributes to the telling of the story - although this is very brief. It then consists of a large title, with finer details at the bottom of the poster. The vulnerable victim is often shown among something scary - above it is the blood stains on the 'Slaughter House' and the hand covering the mouth in 'Scream'.
For our poster we thought we would use a central image of our protagonist looking vulnerable but again use the convention of representing the danger in the background. This helps establish the genre further and shows the audience it is a horror, but without giving too much of the movie away.
Above are our ideas that we thought we should put down first before attempting to create the poster. We came up with a range of different ideas for the different fonts we could use, the colours and ideas for taglines.
To create our poster we used the software Photoshop, a raster graphics editor.
The background for our poster was the first thing we decided to create. Initially we were going to have a plain black background, until we thought that this could be seen as boring and we could have something that suits the genre more. We decided to stick with the black background, but found one that looked like it had scratches, which we thought was quite effective. Although it wasn't much different from a plain background, it definitely added to the horror-theme.
For our font we decided to use plain white and have it in bold writing. We needed to add the text necessary first so we knew what space we would have left for the central images.
Firstly we added the main title - with the same font that we used within our production. From here we added reviews, which make it more appealing for an audience. Underneath the title we added the tagline 'a childhood nightmare brought to life'. This was stolen from our trailer, which makes a clear link between the two.
From here we had to add the production companies that we used in our production. We used 'Blumhouse' because they're known for producing horror films, and 'White Productions' which was our own production company. We also had to include specific text at the bottom about who the trailer stars and the names of the director, editor, music producer, production design and sound and finally who it was written by. Although this small text is something the audience isn't going to read, it's still necessary. Not only this but we wrote the link to our website so people could investigate further if they wanted to about our film.
Finally, text-wise, we added an award that the film had won. This was from the Sun-dance film festival and is located at the top of the poster in a central position which acts as a positive, selling point for the film that it has received a recognised award.
Following on from this we decided to have the villain from our production in our poster. We took a screen grab that we also incorporated in our trailer to use as our key photo. We chose the screen grab (shown below) because it shows all her features that we created to make her more scary. She is shown with her hair covering her face and also black make-up around her eyes. Not only this but we see her in the contrasting white dress with the bandage also wrapped around her arm. We cut out the background of this picture so it was just the outline of the villain that would be put on the poster.
Following on from this, there wasn't any images of Rosie (our protagonist) throughout the footage we collected that we thought was appropriate or good enough to use as one still, strong image. As a consequence of this we had to plan a time to meet up with Rosie, on a day and time we were all free to take pictures of her. We had to bring certain equipment with us to the shoot. For example, we wanted her to be crying in the image so we had to bring make-up and make-up wipes to ensure this was a possibility. We also borrowed a special camera to ensure the image was good quality.
We took the images in front of a black background so it was easier when it came to editing to edit it back on the chosen black background of the poster.
After we gathered the images, we had to edit them onto the poster so they looked effective. We used the software Photoshop again to edit our images. The picture below shows how we had to blur the edges of the image so it fit in well with the black background used and ensured there was no harsh, black outline separating the image from the background. By applying a blur it allowed a blend to be created between the two different images.
From here, we had to edit the lighting of the image. We decided to have it appear as though there was a light coming from the bottom right corner of the image which created a slight shadow. This created an eerie look and also took hold of the representation that Rosie was the victim.
From this, we then changed the general lighting of the whole poster. We made it so that the protagonist, positioned to the front of the poster, was in a lighter light as opposed to the antagonist, positioned further back, in a darker, more ominous light. The protagonist also became more faded, which allowed it to blend more and appear less harsh.
Below is our final poster. Overall, it is clear that we have stuck to some general conventions of posters. It is clear that this is a horror from the poster, which means that we have applied the correct conventions.
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