Evaluation Question 1: Posters

When creating our posters, we came up with several different ideas. Our first poster (left) took its influence from the movie poster for The Last Exorcism. Both characters in each poster are standing in a similar (unnatural)position, with similar costumes: an old, blood-stained dress. One major difference between the two is the colour scheme. Whilst they both consist of dull, grey colours, our own poster consists of low key tones, which is a common convention amongst horror posters. Our poster gives a sense of mystery and foreboding; things can be hidden by darkness. On the other hand, The Last Exorcism seems to break this convention by using high key tones, giving a sense of a harsh reality. The fonts used for the titles are distressed and ragged-looking, and the individual letters are different sizes, connoting a sense of unbalance or that something isn't quite right.

For our second poster design, we were inspired by The Ring Two movie poster. Both characters have the same overall look: an over-sized, dirty, white dress, and messy, dark, long hair which hides the face. The main difference between the two photos is that The Ring post features a long shot of the antagonist, whereas in our poster, only the head to the waist can be seen. Both posters use low key tones, connoting something dark and sinister. Judging by the fact that everything bad that is happening is coming from a young girl, it makes it even more so. Another interesting similarity between the two posters are the titles. Both titles feature numbers: Last ONE Out, and The Ring TWO. These numbers seem to be the focal point of the titles because the font of the individual words are of a larger scale than the rest of the title.- Hayley

We chose to base our teasers on ones such as 'The Ring' and 'The Last Exorcism' not only because they are both very popular movies but because they had the kind of emotion behind them that we wanted to portray in our movie posters.

As a group we sat down and looked at the possible poster ideas that we could use. We noticed that a minority did not have the protagonist or antagonist in the center of the poster. The rule of three was not in use here and we liked the thought of creating a slight stir in the audience psyche by having the model at the side of the poster.

We also looked at the posters of protagonist females and discovered that they are often shown in a medium shot to extreme long shot.

It was also observed that they stand in either very provocative positions or in a fright filled one with there head turned slightly to the right so the target audience can see the emotion on their faces. We decided to imitate the movie poster Perfume (seen above); however, the focal point of our poster is the protagonists face due to the low key lighting that we used.
It was decided that we should use very dull dry tones for the poster and so it was edited in Adobe Photoshop CS3 to have a more pastel look than vibrant which in horror is not a popular colouring scheme.

As with many low key posters we chose to use gray and white for the anchorage of the posters. The credits below were also created with the same idea in mind. As a group we decided that we should not use colours that were too bright and unmanageable for an epileptic audience however we did not think of this when we had created the poster.

If I had the chance to create these posters again, i would dedicate a little more time to them and have been a little more experimental than i have been. - Swarica