Film Poster

This is our finished film poster. We are really happy with our final product as we feel it is a good reflection of the story line. We have chosen an image where Megan is posing with a gun ready to pull the trigger. There is a shadow in the background which we created with some low lighting, this made a really interesting effect on the white wall which we both really liked as it was a really clear and crisp silhouette of our main character. We made the decision to include the gun in our film poster, as we feel this is a really necessary thing to include in a film poster which is for a crime/action film. The gun makes it really clear what genre our film is immediately and is really good iconography for what is going to be show in the upcoming film. We blended our photo of Megan, with a landscape photo of London, which shows the houses of parliament, including big ben. These are all iconic tourist features of London, which will immediately catch people's eyes as they would see our film poster on a billboard etc. We felt it was necessary to include this landscape image in our film poster, as our film was filmed in London and it would also make the film appeal to a global audience.
We also included on our film poster, an advertisement to go and watch it in the IMAX cinema, the movie's website and a hashtag that also advertises the film. Just above our films name we included the slogan 'London's Biggest Secret' as we feel something like this would really draw our audience in. As Megan is our main actor in the film we had to include her name in the film poster, as she is a world known actress, so her name alone would attract a wider audience.

We wearnt sure about the type of image we wanted to be shown for our film poster as through our research we had seen quite a variation of different images shown on film posters. These ranging from close ups of the main character, an action shot or quite a posed shot. The only way to decide what type of image we wanted to present for our film poster was to take a variation of different shots and see which one represented the image we wanted to portray about our film the most.

The first photo we took of Megan was a forward facing mid shot, which included her face and some of her body. We made Megan pull a serious face with her eyes looking directly into the camera so that the audience would feel slightly intimidated by the character Sienna. We thought this image would look nice in black and white, however we felt like the pose looked a bit awkward as she had both hands behind her back, also the image wasn't particularly focused on anything or any feature of her.However one thing we did like about this shot was the amount of space which surrounded Megan around the edges, as there were places where we could write important information which is needed on a film poster such as the name of the film, the slogan, the actors name and the date it is is released. However, we decided not to use this shot as it looked a bit pointless and unfocused on any aspect of our film.

The next image we experimented with was this close up of Megan. We had seen quite a few film posters which had just a close up of the big star acting in the film, with simply some text written at the bottom of the image telling the viewer the film title, the actors name, and when the film would be in cinemas. One thing we liked about this image was the way the shot had really focused on Megan's face and not her body. In particular the shot had really focused on her eyes which stood out massively, this makes the image quite eye catching. However once again we had the same problem as we did with the previous photo. We didn't really feel that this image captured what our film was about, therefore we felt that this image wouldn't really advertise our film well enough for it to be used as the film poster image.

After not really liking the way we were taking any of the previous photos for our film poster, we decided to take a different out look to the whole film poster idea. This time we took a shot which was landscape instead of portrait as we thought that often, film posters are advertised on billboards and buses, so a landscape photo would be much more useful to create rather than a portrait. We also decided to make our photo a little more posed and bring back in the gun to our photos, as we felt it really would state to an audience what our film was going to be about. We then directed Megan to point the gun at a wall, in an intimidating way. We feel that this pose is really intimating and is one of which that shows the audience a person in a situation that they are in control off. We feel this is something we really wanted to get out in our film trailer, that it is an action film based around a woman, not a man!! At this stage in the photographing process we had already started to get ideas about how we could edit our film poster and decided we needed to capture an image that would look suitable with an image of London blended into the background. We then started to take more and more landscape photos, but this was the one we were most happy with. We also felt that with this photo Megan's face was very centered and there was loads of space around the outside to write necessary information about the film around.
To create our poster we used Photoshop. We firstly edited the image of Megan, so that it was slightly purple, to do this we went onto 'Image', 'Adjustments' and then 'Colour Balance. We played around with different shades of colours on the image so it was slightly purple/blue. Once we were happy with the colour we then added in our landscape image of London. We chose this landscape image of London as we felt that the pink, orange and shadow colours which were featured on the photo really matched with the way we had just edited our picture of Megan to have a more purple/blue look to it. The way the landmarks of London were in the shadows as well was something we knew would benefit the image of Megan that would be blended with it, as the dark colours of the landmarks would really stand out in a professional way.
Once we had both images in the canvas we used the blending tools to blend both images together nicely. We also made the image of Megan slightly opaque so that the image of London could be clearly seen underneath it.
Once we were happy with the images, we had to add text as we found on the bottom of many film posters they have a huge paragraph of writing with all of the film crews credits. We then had to find an appropriate font, and changed the size of it when we writ important names e.g Poppy and Serina. We then added in our film title, slogan, actors name and advertisements for the IMAX, website and a hashtag for twitter.

We asked our target audience what they thought of our film poster and they said...
"Love the colour scheme, its really eye-catching"
"The image of London has been edited really well"
"I like the way the gun is not in your face obvious, it really reveals a lot about the character of the girl, she seems very secretive".