Evaluation Question 1 part 4

Poster Continued

How did you go about designing your poster?

So from the codes and conventions of the psychological thriller posters I decided that I would first take close ups of the two main characters of the short film. When doing this I made sure that both were positioned exactly the same so that their faces would be aligned and I could then Photoshop the two faces together to make a double face. Upon doing this I realised that the image didn't look as good as what it could have been and decided to redraft the poster.

I decided to go against the usual conventions of what characters faces are expressing and went for ambivalent and mocking expressions to make it unclear to the audience as to who was the antagonist and who was the protagonist. Following on from this I decided that I would remove the background of the photos and using the threshold tool is Photoshop removed the entire colour from them making their portraits come out in a black posterize format. From this I then place one portrait landscape and the other inverted underneath it to create a sort of shadow effect to symbolise that the shadow of one character is his alter ego.This kept with the codes and conventions as they were dark and depressing with an enigma set.

From this I then took a background from Google images of a crumbling wall that had rot and decay setting in. The reason behind choosing this was that it conformed to psychological thriller conventions of being bleak and desolate; furthermore once this was placed in Photoshop I resized the image slightly de-saturated it using the contrast and brightness tool and then selecting the arrange tool sent it to the back of the poster so that it was set as the background.

In addition to this I decided that with the colour scheme the main feature of the film was blood being spilled and so decided to add blood splatters that were a deep crimson making it look fresh and stand out in the poster. This was the same for the main title which was created in a font creepy font website http://www.fontspace.com/category/blood  and downloaded. Furthermore the log line was in white font abiding by the codes and conventions and it also stood out more than the black text.

Finally I decided to take a page out of ‘The number 23’s’ book by adding a short extract from the logline and placing it in black and copying it all over the page to add the psychological theme to it. The information that I included in this poster was the title (which is essential) a logline and the billing block. I deliberately decided to not add the actor’s names to the poster because with short film the actors names are not used to attract an audience (such as in mainstream Hollywood with names such as Al Pacino) and also because it furthered the mystery as to who these people were.