Putting Together the 'Lullaby' Poster

After preparation and producing a image base for my poster, I began to put it all together. The first step was to create a billing block, a very common feature to most film posters, for the bottom of the poster (the most commonly used space for this component), by opening up another photoshop document. I decided to start by doing this as I knew exactly where I wanted it to go and it wouldn't impact where other elements where to be placed. I found a template online that allowed me to just simply personalise the writing to suit our own film by filling in the gaps with our names. I then downloaded the typical font used for the billing block. I was going to make the background of the billing block transparent, however I realised that the bottom of my poster already was predominantly black and so filled the background black to fit with this. Having the background black also meant that the writing would stand out/contrast that I decided to turn white as this is the typical colour choice (this evident from my previous research).

Obviously I could only use Zoe and I as the names as we were the only ones who created the trailer, with the exception of Ellie and Holly's name that we used for the actresses. However, this looks unusual for a billing block as there are usual a lot more production names that appear on here.

The next step was adding film festival logo's. I did this as our trailer would most probably be an independent film and these types of festivals, such as Tribeca and Cannes are sometimes a huge success for film advertisement. To effectively fit in with the colour scheme of my poster I inverted the colours as seen here, either side of the text. I achieved this by googling the logos, opening them up in Photoshop and making the background transparent. I then inverted the colours so they would go from white to black and vice-versa with the text. I placed them onto the bottom of my poster to finalise the billing block section, which is a common place for logo's like this to go.

Through research, I had found that quite a lot of posters included a couple of the main actors' names that starred in the film featured along the top. Although this may not be as common in independent film posters, I thought that it was effective component to draw attention to the poster for people that may know the actors quite well if they have starred in other favourite movies of theirs. After consideration I decided to add the two names of our actresses "Eleanor Bray" and "Holly Radford"to the top band of the poster and I felt like this completed the overall look and composition of the poster. I also made these names in white as well to contrast against the dark background. My decision to make the rest of the writing white on the poster was to allow only the main title 'Lullaby' to be in red to draw together the colour of Ellie's lip colour, connoting danger and alarm. This makes the title one of the main components of the poster which is what brands the trailer overall.

Next , I added the most important component, the main title/heading; 'Lullaby'. I created my own font  for this and added effects to make it look more distressed and smoked for a eerie feel. To do this I firstly turned the background of the font transparent and used the 'art history brush' tool to scratch some of the font away around the edges to distress it, before I then went to Filter>Blur>Radial Blur. I could then adjust the settings to be as smoked out as I wanted on top of the distressing. I was left with this overall outcome which I am really pleased with as I feel gives it a ghostly feel which fits with our storyline.

The final touch I added was a date of release. This convention or 'Coming Soon' are very common of movie posters and so I added this underneath the billing block. I used the pipette tool to get almost the same colour of the main title to maintain the colour theme. Here is my final poster that I produced;

Magazine Image Edit

Out of my photo shoot for the main image of my magazine, I chose the above image after changing my mind quite a lot and editing a lot of images to see which one looked the most professional and worked better all round.  Drawing inspiration from the Film Comment magazines, I noticed that they near enough always use a main protagonist from the film to feature as their main image and so i wanted to do this to reflect the composition and style of the magazine. As this image is landscape it needed to be cropped in some way in order to fit and look effective as a magazine cover and so this was the first step that I took. Originally I was considering this photograph for my poster and that's why I had taken the image landscape. I really liked the colouring already, how Holly is silhouetted with a kind of clinical back lighting and so after i had cropped the image, I increased the brightness/contrast and adjusted the curves until it was how I felt it looked best.  Overall I liked the simplicity of the image, however it still grabs your attention with mystery wondering who the girl in the photograph is.

Magazine Image Photoshoot

As I did with my poster, I conducted a photo shoot for pictures for my magazine cover. I wanted to keep it simplistic and have an automatic essence that it is of the horror genre. Originally I tried to recreate a stand out scene from our trailer where our protagonist gets grabbed by an unknown being. I thought that this summed up our film in one shot and would be affective in grabbing the audience's attention. Also the position of Ellie (our protagonist), looking to the right is a convention that I noticed was used often when analysing already existing magazines as it draws the readers' attention to where you would typically turn the page to read inside, sending subliminal messages to the audience.

However, when I placed this as my background and added text on top, the fitting was not proportionate and it looked disproportionate and unprofessional for a magazine cover. Although I really like the essence of the photograph it just didn't work when put to practice aesthetically. 

I then, on our second day of shooting, decided to try and capture another photograph while on set of filming to be inspired by Film Comment magazine that uses still frames from the film as their main cover image. Just as we finished a scene I took some photographs of the unknown supernatural being in our trailer (Holly as our antagonist), stood silhouetted in the doorway.  I loved this image as it still captured the dark and eerie feeling that I wanted to encapsulate the horror genre, but it told us a little about the film but left the viewers guessing on who this character is without revealing too much. A lot of my images tuned out blurry, however the one you can see below is the one image that turned out best in my opinion. this is the image I decided to use for my main cover image.

Magazine Mock-Up

In the same process that I did for my poster, I created a mock up to help me to decide the layout of the components of my magazine cover. I decided to make the main image the most dominant component (around 75%) of the cover from the inspiration of Film Comment magazine where the cover is all focused around the image itself to sell the magazine rather then the cover lines or the magazine title name itself. Although Film Comment is not the most well known film magazine, and the layout is simplistic, by making the masthead take up around 25% (including the cover lines), it will allow my magazine to still look professional. 

Film Comment Magazine Cover Analysis

I liked the simplicity of the Film Comment magazine, so this was an obvious choice for me to choose as my main inspiration for my own. Here is my analysis of 'The Invisible Woman' issue;

The key and main feature/convention of this cover is definitely the main image. The coinciding colour scheme and main focus on one cover line and image is the main driving force behind this magazine being my main inspiration. This is because in the time I have to complete this task, I would not be able to create or produce a magazine inspired by the likes of Empire or Total Film which is heavily CGI based that I do not have access to. I will choose a colour scheme for my own and carry this throughout the image to create an overall feel to the cover to grab my demographics attention.

Film Poster Feedback

I wanted to get feedback on my film poster for "Lullaby" and so I created a board in Padlet that allows people to post little comments on their thoughts surrounding my overall poster. I added a caption at the top to ask people to leave constructive criticism so that I will be able to include this feed back in my evaluation at a later date. I found using this site really quick, easy and I find it really effective and such a fantastic way to gain feedback that looks good professional and unique. I will use this site again to use the same technique for my magazine cover.

Created with Padlet

Film Poster

Film Poster Mock Up

Before I created my poster, I made a mock up using Publisher to experiment with how I wanted the layout to look from various research into other posters to gain inspiration. Although this is simplistic and I may change things around while in the process of putting everything together, it provides me with a sort of base to start my ideas which I can then build from. I will create my own billing block and create my own unique title font by editing a previously chosen font. I will do this by distressing it and editing it a little to fit in more effectively with my theme of horror.

 

 



Magazine Inspiration

As my second ancillary product that I have to create is a magazine cover, I started to look at possible professional magazine covers to inspire ideas for my own. The  most obvious examples would be magazines such as Empire and Total Film, however I found that a lot of the overs of these were mainly CGI based which would not be accessible for me to do to a professional standard in the time that I have to complete it and with the lack of facilities and software I would need. If I would have had more time, it would have been a great learning experience for me to have a go at creating my own front cover with more artistic elements, but I decided to make mine quite simplistic for this brief.

To find the most appropriate magazine that would have similar conventions that I could create and allow me to draw inspiration from, I searched around and found a magazine known as; 'Film Comment'. After discovering the magazine, I visited the site for the magazine which includes many articles that delve in to all things film that are really interesting. Below is a link to the website;

                                                          http://www.filmcomment.com

The professional colour schemes and font have stayed the same throughout the years as Film Comment has developed and the layout has changed. I love the simplicity of the overall cover and it looks really effective with the magazine making sure that the image on the front was the primary focus to sell it to the audience. I noticed that the photographs for the covers in many of these examples shown above, appear to be action frames from the films the magazine is promoting that issue. I think that this is really effective and hope to produce this effect when creating my own cover. Also the main convention that really appealed to me was the extrapolation of the colour for half of the masthead from a colour in the image shown. As you can see all of the above examples have a specific coloured element of the "comment" of the masthead to pull out certain colours, in turn setting the overall theme of the cover. I will definitely try and replicate this idea when it comes to the production of my own cover.

Furthermore, after analysing other magazines such as 'Total Film' and research into these magazines, I found that they primarily focus their content on huge blockbuster films and as our trailer and overall advertising of our film has an independent feel underlying the inspiration, I came to the conclusion that our movie would not be advertised or featured on the cover. After considering this I thought it would be much more appropriate to do a cover that is more realistic in terms of our trailer and reflect what is probably more likely to be shown if our trailer was actually advertised professionally and so 'Film Comment' is the best option for all of these reasons.

Changes to our Trailer Update

The overall opinion when receiving feedback for our trailer was that the last half of the sound should add additional conventional sound effects to our original soundtrack to build tension, rather than using something completely different and alter the flow of the trailer. After research we decided on a violin effect. This is common in a lot of horror trailers.