Final Font for Movie Poster

I decided to look at the serif fonts on 'Dafont.com' after research into movie posters and narrowed it down to the three that I felt fit well with the title of our trailer, 'Lullaby', and also what would have a little bit more movement than a standard san serif font would;

The fonts above are my narrowed down options and although they do look similar overall, I thought that the middle one stood out most to me as it is bold and as I wanted to do some form of manipulation or distressing to the title, this font will work best to still stand out through editing.

Font Options for Film Trailer Research

One if not the most important component of a film poster is the title. This is because first, obviously without one, you wouldn't know by glance what the film was, but also because the font of a title creates the brand of the film as a whole, and by creating a poster in some cases just with words on in a certain font, can make it instantly recognisable to the audience. For my own title I didn't want to use a generic font such as comic sans for example as this is not commonly used in professional circumstances and so to try and make mine as professional as possible, I went on "Dafont.com" to see if I could find one that would fit effectively. I have used Dafont.com previously for the making of my magazine cover etc during my AS level, however I was overwhelmed with the number of fonts that were possible for the horror genre (either serif or sans serif). To get more of an idea on what professional movie posters used I did a little bit of research and below are some that I came across;

From looking at the images above of the posters, the first thing I noticed was the the majority of the titles where in red and a couple in white. This is probably due to the denotations and connotations that are drawn from the colour such as blood and danger etc. Also I seen that quite a few of them had some form of distressing or manipulation done to them to deviate away from just a plain font. The most popular font for horror film posters seems to be serif fonts and so that is what I will research for while considering all of the above points mentioned to create my own title and it be as professional looking as possible.

Whilst researching, I remembered watching 'Omen' a while back and was curious to see what the poster was like and how it was created, as the film was released in 1976, and compare it with recent movie posters such as 'Sinister' (above). It was interesting to see that not much at all has changed in the form of the title conventions as, following on from my point above, the title still is coloured red (the typical colour branded with the horror genre) and the title is slightly manipulated and almost looks worn. Considering everything that I have found while researching I have decided to pick a serif font and distress in in some way to make it look individual and my own font however still pulling inspiration from real movie posters to allow my own to look as professional as possible.

Film Poster Editing Process

After my photo shoot for images for my film poster, I decided on the final image that I wanted to use. There was quite a bit of editing that I wanted to do on it to make it look more professional and so I began to do this in photoshop. Firstly, I removed any blemishes on Ellie's skin using the spot healing tool. This took most, if not all of the imperfections on her skin away.  After this, I also edited the exposure (image>adjustments>exposure...), the curves of the image (image>adjustments> curves...) and brightness and contrast (image>adjustments>brightness/contrast). this made the overall image a lot darker and more shaded. I did this as it created more of a mysterious feel and capture the unknown horror of this genre.

Original Image                                       With Blemishes                          After Editing

Also I wanted the focus in the image to be on Ellie's eye as for my next stage I added an important component of the trailer as a reflection in her eye.

Also I wanted the focus in the image to be on Ellie's eye as for my next stage I added an important component of the trailer as a reflection in her eye.
One scene of our trailer that keeps the audience in the dark and makes them question what has happened is a series of frames of a lifeless looking hand dripping with blood. As this is an important scene for our trailer I wanted to include it some way and so added this into Ellie's eye in the image. To this I placed the bloody hand image from my photo shoot over the image of Ellie. I then sized the image by dragging in the corners, so that it fit over her pupil and iris.

Obviously, as you can see from the image above, this does not look realistic and is still a squared image over the eye. The next step was to shape the image to the shape of the eye and so I took the eraser tool and began t shape the edges into and almond shape to fit the eye. Then, to make it look more like an authentic reflection, I adjusted the blending options of the photograph to 'Screen' which gave a slight transparency so that you could still see the iris through the image. This was the result;

Overall I am really pleased with how this worked out as when it was originally just a thought, I wasn't sure wether I would be able to make it look authentic enough but I really like the overall effect that it gave. It keeps the audience guessing what has happened with the hand dripping in blood, and might entice them to go and see the film, if it was actually to be made, to find the answers. To the left is the original image and to the right is the final image for the base of my film poster before the next stages of putting it together.

Photoshoot for my Film Poster

Film Poster Research/Inspiration

When it came to deciding what I wanted the 'Lullaby' film poster to look like (ancillary product), I started to do some initial research into what common codes and conventions you see on horror film posters to get some ideas on what would tie in to the thrilling feel I hope to capture.

http://www.sicklycat.com/2011/11/22/the-15-most-over-used-movie-poster-cliches/

The link above is a website, that cleverly collages the most commonly used movie posters for a varied range of genres and as this was my original idea, I was really pleased when I stumbled upon this site. Although this layout and composition has been used a lot, I will add my own flare that coincides well with our trailer and gain inspiration from the marketing of one particular film which originally gave me the idea for having a close up eye frame for my poster. I found it really interesting to see that even though all of the images above are from the same genre, just how different each one can be, by the use of lighting, composition, colour saturation/use of colour and theme. This really made me think about the feel of my trailer and has given me some factors to think about that will make my poster impactful and as effective as it can be to capture the horror/mysterious feel that I want my audience to see instantly when they first look at the poster.

Art of the Trailer - Production Company Research and Inspiration

Due to the fact that our trailer is a horror trailer, we would have to make our ident quite dark and relative to this, however we recently watched the film 'Napoleon Dynamite' (2004), and were really drawn to the quirky title sequence that opens the film. After some research, I found that the sequence was filmed in a basement with an incredibly low budget, which proved to me that even on the lowest budget, like what we have, a creative way of promoting something is achievable. Although this film is an 'indie' comedy (screened at the Sundance Film Festival), I really liked the differential quality it has to others. We may use this as inspiration to show our ident company name 'Spectre House Productions', with a darker feel to suit our genre and add an independent feel. Our initial idea/thought was to use a flip pad drawing techniques for a short sequence, where when flipped through fast the pages would display the ident name and a few other components to promote the film. Below is a link to a website explaining the title sequence, why and how it was filmed with a video and podcast snippet.

http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/napoleon-dynamite/#.Up0FWqPKg3k.blogger

Our Draft of our Trailer

 

This is a draft of our trailer 'Lullaby'. The trailer as a whole is almost finished such as the visual frames and title screens etc, however the sound after 1:10 into the trailer is still unfinished. We thought that the track at the start of the trailer, running throughout, would fit well but when we applied it to the whole length, it just didn't fit effectively to the feel and mood we want the audience to experience and so this will need to be fixed. We are unsure of how to edit the sound from this point, and so we will ask our peers and teachers for their opinion and adjust it accordingly.

Poster Analysis: Let the Right One In

After analysing the film trailer for the 2008 film 'Let the Right One In', and finding it really inspirational for our trailer, I decided to analyse the illustrative poster that was promoted alongside the trailer. I analysed the poster using Flikr and the link is down below. I really liked the sole composition of the poster and hope to use the idea of the blood dripping hand as an indication of death, rather that showing a physical murder, as a component on my own movie poster.

                              http://www.flickr.com/photos/101147147@N03/13048182924/

Spectre House Ident Filming

As our film would most probably be an independent film, we wanted our ident to reflect this nature and to draw inspiration from the 'Napoleon Dynamite' introduction scene. We were quite lucky in the fact that we are both really into stop motion animation and so we wanted our ident to have this kind of feel of film, where our production company name 'Spectre House Productions' would appear but also something, given our time constraint, would not take a relatively long time, as stop motion animation can take hours to film. Our final idea after talking was to create a flip book that in intervals spelt out our ident name. To be able to do this, we bought a book that had a flexible cover, to bend backward and look effective, and squared paper to allow us to get the font as close to identical on each page as possible. To cater to our horror themed trailer, we didn't want our font to be as curly and fancy writing as that seen in the Napoleon Dynamite example and so we tried to make the font look just handwritten which added a raw element to the scene. In addition to this we wanted to write the font in black biro, as the front of the flip book was orange, we didn't want the colours to be really bright primary or pastel colours as this would not correlate with our horror genre and give more of the feel of a teen movie. to also over come this look and so the focus was on the writing itself, we placed the flip book on a black background to denote more mystery for the horror genre.

The video below is our original take of filming;



This out take is obviously very slow and we intended it to be fast but still resemble a stop motion film and so we uploaded it in to iMovie and right clicked and selected 'show speed editor' ro quicken up the pace of the flipping of the pages to make it more fluid.



Above is the first sped up version that we created, however we felt that it was still too long and disjointed to watch and so we then sped it up even more to our desired effect. We also noticed that the ambient sound in the background of the clip (which was the television) that we were going to cut out became this scratchy almost creepy squeaky sound that we ended up really liking as it fit with the horror genre well and so we kept this in the final version of our clip.