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;