Film poster image - Before and After

Before

This was the image we decided to use for our film poster. We decided we need to change a lot of the feature in this image, such as the lighting, colour of lighting and shadows. The colours in this image are not very suitable for our image, the colours in this image are mainly browns and yellows, more neutral colours. This does not fit in very well with our film genre, horror. Also we were not happy with the face of the character as he does not look very mysterious. This means we will have to heavily edit this image to get the end result we are looking for.

After

As you can see we have heavily edited this photo to make it fit our genre and suit the themes of our film. We first changed the contrast, hue and gamma levels of the image to hide the features of the figure. We then set about changing the colour of the lighting, we decided to change the lighting from a dingy yellow to a dingy blue. We did this by placing a blue filter over the image, this changed all of the neutral colours to colours that are more associated with the horror genre, such as blues, blacks and whites. This gives the image more eary feel, which strongly hints towards the genre of the film. We believe that this image is very good as the lighting and location are excellent and the fact that you are unable to make out the figure's face makes the whole image very mysterious. We are very happy with the end result of this editing and we are going to use this image as the main feature of our film poster.

Decisions during film poster production

These screenshots show two versions of our film poster, each one is slightly different in terms of layout and general positioning. The first image directly above shows our first idea, this is a very conventional film poster with the title centralized at the bottom of the image along with a small tagline and the actors names. We decided to go with these conventions and we believe it suited our main image as is blended in well with the colour scheme and didn't interrupt anything in the background. In this image we have the tagline over two separate lines. This allowed us to centralize the text. However we weren't very happy with how this looked as we believe it made this area of the poster look almost untidy.

However, the only issue we cam across with both of these images was that the similar layouts left a large empty gap at the top of the poster. We tried placing the main heading, tagline and actors names in this gap but we were not happy with how it looked. We then moved the heading and tagline back to where they were originally and placed only the actors names at the top. This also match conventions of other movie posters and the text acted as a "skyline". We believe that this has made our piece look a lot more professional and looks of quite a high standard.

This second image has the same general layout as our first image, apart from a few minor changes we made to the location of the heading. We have moved the heading further up the image as we decided to place production company logos at the very bottom of the image to match further conventions of existing movie posters. Another change we made was to have the tagline all on the same line. We were very happy with how this looked and have kept it this way. This is simply because it makes this area of the image look more neat. We also believe that it makes the whole piece look more professional and is similar to existing posters we have seen in magazines and in local cinemas.

Photos

This was our first attempt at photographing our business card, as you can see we used the same spray technique as we had practiced. This proved very successful as we all agreed that it was the right technique for the job in hand. We also used a different lighting source and this also proved very successful. This is because we got a yellow, dingier light. This added to the eary theme of our magazine cover. We all agreed that we'd use this light source again as it proved to look more unique and had a professional look to it.

We then experimented with different techniques and patterns, we tried a "bloody handprint" technique, as shown above, to give the image a more sinister feel. We felt however that this wasn't very effective as we were unable to get a finish of an acceptable quality. We therefore decided not to use this technique and to stick with using the spray finish we perfected previously.

Before we jumped right straight into spraying paint onto our prop business card, we decided to use a mock card as a tester. This proved to be very useful as we perfected the technique of effectively painting the card to make it look like blood splatter. However we did find a few imperfections in this method, one of them being it looked quite bare and very bright. So we chose to darken the whole image and use a dingier light source to give it a slightly eary feel.

This is the business card we designed and printed to use as the main item in our magazine cover, we chose to use a business card as it contrasts with the dominant "Psychotic Killer" theme of our film. This shows the name and profession of our main character, this shows his professional side as opposed to his "alter-ego".