Creating the Film Poster

Now that I had finished my research it was time to start creating our film's poster. As many of the posters I researched mainly included a portraiture subject, I believed this created a more powerful and effective poster design, and therefore, inspired me to use a similar technique using this portraiture design for our film poster. As each existing film poster included a shot of a character in the film and are also pictured with an object or doing something that relates to the events of the film narrative I wanted to include similar features.

      Looking back through our film I wanted to capture a moment that would give a hint of the narrative to the viewer. Immediately the shot of the hostages bloodied face intrigued me; by having this shot as the main subject of the poster I could achieve the portrait design I wanted. I selected and print screened this shot.

     I now wondered what to do with this image in order to make a poster with a good quality appearance. Looking at the blood on the hostage's face a unique idea sparked to mind; I wanted to re-create this image by forming the face of the hostage through blood splatters. I knew this idea was very complex, however, I believed that it would be an extremely effective and powerful poster once finished. The only way I could think of producing this design was by manually painting the face and blood splatters.

     To paint this image I used the materials of black water colour and black Indian drawing ink on A3 paper. By using black water colour I could lightly paint a basic image of the hostage's face - only applying the mid-tones and trying to exclude any harsh tones. I then used black Indian drawing ink to apply the deeper harsh tones and blood splatter; using the ink on the areas I wanted to highlight, for instance the features of the face (eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows). I kept on applying the ink to these features and used a straw to blow the liquid for it to spread in an uncontrollable way. This formed the look of splattered blood.

     Now that the painting was done I could scan it and produce a digital image. My next step was to edit the picture in order to make the blood splatter stand out more, this could be done by using the tools of Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Opening the picture in this program I could change the settings of the image, adjusting its brightness, contrast and mid-tones. I continued this editing until only the blood splatter and features of the face were prominent, with much of the background and mid-tones blurred out.

     It was now time to add the film title. Again looking back at my film poster research I knew it would be more effective to have the font of the text relating to the film narrative. As our film involved foreign terrorists I already had an idea of what font I wanted. I searched the internet for fonts that had an Arabic style to them and found one that was perfect. Using the snipping tool I could select the title in the Arabic font and then open it with Paint. Here I resized the text enough to suit the poster picture. I inserted the title into the picture and placed it at the bottom of the image.

I now needed to change the colours of the image to make the black ink splatters look like blood. Again I could edit the image, this time adjusting the colour to bright red, then adjusting the contrast and brightness until I successfully achieved the gorey red colour I wanted. This was the planned finishing point poster, and despite it looking extremely strong and impressive I knew there was something missing.

     From here my poster research greatly helped me; I wanted to involve the narrative of the story a bit more in my poster in order to give the viewer a slight hint of what the film is about. I was now inspired to introduce an object - I looked at the props we used in our film and examined the effectiveness of each (these included the gun, bloodied bag, tools and briefcase). Suddenly it became clear to me that the most effective prop to use would be the briefcase as it would allow me to convey a clue of what the film is based around. I had to combine these two elements, my poster and the briefcase. I printed off my poster onto A3 paper where I could then place the briefcase on top of the hardcopy and take a picture of it. It took me a number of times to get the image I wanted, placing the briefcase in a variety of different positions to get the right composition. When I had achieved the image, it was clear I needed to go back to the editing board one more time.

     Returning to Picture Manager I needed to give the poster more quality and make the image look sharper. Once again, editing the image's brightness, contrast and mid-tones gave a precise and detailed appearance. The last stage was to add the credits, this was easily done by choosing a appropriate font and inserting text boxes onto the poster in the specific places. I added the production credits and positioned them beneath the film title. I also added the two main cast of the film (Alex Rose and Ed Smith) and positioned them in a larger font either side of the title. My film poster was finally finished! Looking at my final poster I could see it would look extremely powerful and intriguing to the viewer. I believe this poster would extremely effective in attracting audiences to watch our film.