Different Stages Of My Poster Design

In this post I will show you the various different stages that our group went through during our design of the film poster. We did this so we could eventually achieve a poster that we knew would have the desired effect of our audience. This effect is making sure that the poster was eye catching, intriguing and professional to attract a big as audience as possible.

The first stage:

The second stage:

The final stage of production:

Re-editing the trailer

It is really is quite hectic now.

We have completely re-designed the poster and magazine cover and we need to make the trailer fit with that new design. We also want to incorporate some of the feedback we had when we showed the trailer around. Plus I want to get in some of the things that really work in the Paranormal trailer, if I can.

We changed the endframe, added some more sound effects and we also made the text bigger so it is easier to read. As these were the things our audience feedback should pay some more attention to. However, the still is quite small and hard to read. But the main selling points and release date at the end have been made more clear and bold. We have also added an image in at the back to give it a more of an iconic ending making the image stick in people's heads.

Flat planning the magazine cover

Now we have the poster finished we have to work on the magazine cover.

We started with the main image and made it smaller so that we had room for all the other elements we needed to put on the page.

We spent a lot of time making up the magazine title because we wanted it to look really professional.

We then put on the barcode and the price, issue date and issue number.

We put in the title and the strapline and added a cheeky edition to the strapline.

We decided to make the whole edition focussed on Halloween.

Then we laid out the Special Features and the blurb about the movie. We spent a lot of time on this as we wanted to make the text wrap around the image nicely. Luckily we could write our own words so we could change things to fit.

Of course, I am making it sound much easier and quicker than it really was but after a couple of goes this is what we ended up with.

Paranormal Activity Trailer - some great ideas

This is a YouTube clip of a teaser tailer for the movie Paranormal Activity. This is an incredibly low budget scary movie that is having amazing success in the USA and is just being released here in the UK.

I saw this trailer today and think it is really excellent. It uses the idea of showing the audience reaction in the cinema to demonstrate how scary the movie really is. This works amazingly well. I want to go and see it !! I was planning on recording an audience watching my trailer to show how scary it is. This will attract a bigger audience if they see the fright the audience gets in the short video. Unforntunately I didn’t  have enough time.

There are some clips of the actual movie, but they don't tend to give too much away. One can see that the production values are not particularly high, as you would expect with a low budget movie. But, as Blair Witch Project readily demonstrated, you don't need high production values to produce a really gripping and very scary movie.

I have provide a link to a Guardian article about the movie here.

I will see if I can get any of the ideas into our trailer before the deadline.

Redoing the poster

OK. So we've got our final image now. And we have got our title and strapline design. Now we need to combine it all together to come up with a really great poster.

We thought we should make the background black so that the image really stands out and that will help with the title too.

We need to get all the elements together. Most of it we already had but we had to make up a FILMWORKS logo.

We re-wrote the credits too.

The other fonts we used were:

Burghley Entertainment: Gill Sans Regular
Star's names: Onyx regular
Credits: Gill Sans Bold
Launch date: Gill Sans Bold

As you can see we kept to the same font family for the most part.

Then it was on to laying it all out: chosing font sizes, position on the page and exactly how all the type should look.

We put all the elements on the page and then laid them out. This is where Photoshop layers is so useful.

It all took a lot longer than I am making it sound, but in about 6 hours we had something that we all liked.

The final image

Here it is. Photo production over.
Photography and retouching in 24 hours!
Now for the poster itself.
I've updated the main image for the blog too.

Retouching the image

Well, once we had picked the best shot we took it in to Adobe Photoshop and we retouched it to make it look more dynamic. We edged the dark further in to the face and we cleaned up a few things: made the eyes whiter, lost some of the stray hair, put more colour in to the hand, and so on.

We blended the shadows around the face in to a solid black and resized the whole image so that the face would sit well within the poster format.

Then I found some great and wierd glasses in a picture on the web and I cut out the glasses from the rest of the picture and scaled them to fit Lima's face. I then just slightly blurred them to make them look like they were really in the original picture.

Just a few extra tweaks to get all the colours looking good and to add a filter or two and we were there - some hours later!!!

Very happy with the result though.

Here is a picture of Lima after retouching and before the glasses and one with the glasses on.