The first lesson after we completed our trailer was spent on the poster for our film. We researched possible influences for the poster and concentrated mainly on the films 'The Eye' and 'The Last House on the Left'. This gave us a rough idea of what is expected on a horror film poster. The main factor we took away from this research is the idea that on a horror film poster not alot about the film is given away. The main idea of the poster is to intruige the audience into watching the film and draw them into the feeling and emotion behind what is going on within the film.
Following the research into film posters we began to sketched out possible ideas. First of all we considered using the two main characters of our film: Chloe and Holly to show how they are linked. We intially thought of having Holly in the background to show her being from the past and a headshot of Chloe in the foreground to show her being the inferior and in the present. However, as we did not want to give too much away and we wanted to leave the audience in suspense as to what really happens in the film, this idea would not work. Also our trailer does not give much away as to who the little girl is and we wanted to continue this idea of not knowing who the killer is, therefore, this concept for the poster would give away too much to the audience.
After we looked at the film poster for 'The Last House on the Left' we built on the thought of what is the main focus from our film, which we decided was also the house. Therefore, is seemed more sensible to use the house in a similar way that it is used on the poster for 'The Last House on the Left'. Once we decided to use the house as the main target for our poster we had to consider how we would actually use it. We had two possible options which were either to centre the house or to have the house as the main background which is much more overpowering. We wanted to overpower our intended audience thus we chose to follow up the idea of having the ' Talbur Manor' house as our background for the poster.
Week Two
Our main focus for this week was to begin the production of the poster. We had all of our ideas on paper and we just needed to transfer all of our thoughts onto Photoshop. As we were not all very confident with using photoshop it took us a while to get to grips with all of the features and generally how to use them. From filming our trailer, we took some location shots and some of them were of the house we used. The ones we did have looked really good and clearly showed a spooky atmosphere that is portrayed from the house surrounded by the nature. Therefore, we did not have to go back to the location and used the images of the house we had. We resized the canvas and image size of the file to the expected size of a film poster.
The first feature of the poster we experimented with was the production logo, MACK. We designed the logo on photoshop and saved it as a JPEG file so that it was easier to place it onto our poster. Once we placed our logo onto the poster we had to consider what the best position on the page was for it. We felt that because we were going to have all of the credits at the bottom of the page the production logo was more suitable in the bottom corner so that it is visible but does not take the attention away from the other features. We resized the image to an appropriate size and placed it on the bottom right hand corner of the page.
The next step we took was to import the image of the house onto our poster. As we wanted to continue with the colour theme of red and white, we thought it would be a good idea to split the page in half and have one half in black and white and the other with a red tint, to show the past and the present of the evil and wickedness Chloe was portraying in the film. We had difficult at first trying to figure out how to use a red tint effect but once we found out how to do this we had gone off the idea. The reason being that the black and white shows how the time has gone on from the action of the film. Also because the main focus is of the house by keeping a black and white theme, it shows how the house is the history as black and white suggests old and something from the past. However, we still wanted some red in the poster to break up the darkness of it. So we continued with our idea of using the red and white text colour from 'The Last House on the Left' for our film title. All of the other text we had on our film we kept in white so that they are visible and readable but also match the other colours on the poster.
We had a consistent font throughout the trailer and we wanted to link the trailer to our poster through the font we used. We used the font Optima the title of the film, the credits, the tagline and the starring characters were all in this font. The only different between them was the font size as some of them are much more important and need dominating. For our film title, TALBUR was in white and MANOR was in red. We centred the title and made the font fairly large so that is stands out. We also wanted the names of the characters to stand out in a different way to the main film title. We experimented with different text effects like shadows, colours and textures until we found the outer glow tool. We really liked the way this effect makes the text stand out and we could chose the colour we wanted the glow to be as well as how powerful and bright we wanted it.
We experimented with the blurring tool and thought it was a good idea to blur the surrounding of the house in order for the house to look bolder and stand out more. This took a very long time and after a while of blurring different parts we finally saw a difference between the parts we did blur. The blurred sections looked vivid and soft compared to the building of the house that looked strong and sharp against it.
We wanted to add a review to the poster and our first idea was to have a star rating at the top of the page. We found it extremely difficult to find the right star to import to our poster. First of all we used the star symbol on the key pad which looked like *, but it did not have the same effect as an actual shape of a star. Finding a star was really hard as all of the ones we tried to use were either too small and when adjusted became blurred or were the wrong colour and we could not change the colour. Finally we found a black star on google with a white background and imported this onto a new file in photoshop. The star was upside down so we rotated it and changed the colour of the star to white by using the fill bucket tool. Using the quick selection tool we selected the star and cut and pasted it into our original file for the poster. As we wanted a 5 star review we copied it over 4 more times and resized all of them to fit the page correctly. We were amazed by the use of the zoom in and out button and this helped alot with the finer detail.
When we wrote the credits at the bottom of the page we had to decide what information we wanted to show. On other posters the starring characters names are usually mentioned alongside with the production company, directors name and producer. Once it had all been typed we noticed that there was a surname missing off one of the actors names. We clicked on the text tool to change this however, it kept appearing with a new layer and not editing the one we wished it to. This went on for a long time and we simply could not edit the text we originally typed. Therefore, as a result of this we had to delete this text and re-type it ensuring there were no errors.
Once we thought we completed the poster we double checked all of the information on it to make sure it was correct and that everything we needed to be on the poster was on it. However, we had a small feeling that something was not quite right with the image of Talbur Manor. We did not want to over edit it with effects and make it look takey, which is when we came across the darken effect. As our film genre is horror, by darkening the house we would make the house seem more isolated and create a larger impact of an eary and spooky atmosphere. Therefore, the outside of the film poster was darkened which created a dark and tense feeling.
Below is our final film poster.
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