Poster production

I started creating my poster by opening a new document in photoshop and drawing a black square over the page to create my background colour. I chose the colour black because I am studying the genre horror and I saw this as a fitting colour for such a 'dark' theme. Also, black is the easist colour to work with if you want to use other colours as well, there isn't a colour that doesn't go with black.

 

The next step I took in creating my poster was taking a screenshot from my trailer that I thought would suit a poster, and editing this image to make it fit the creepy theme I was going for. I edited the image using the filter galery in photoshop, after experimenting with a few different effects I decided on 'halftone pattern'.

  

I then added my chosen title to the document using the font 'corier new'. I immediatly liked this font for my poster, however I felt it should stand out more. This prompted me to experiment with a few effects and colours.

 I eventually added an 'outer glow' and fiddled around with the settings until I felt it suitable for my poster. I think adding the red gave the title a much more sinister look as red is often associated with blood and this fits in well with my genre, horror. I also added an 'inner shadow' in an attempt to blend the red glow into the letters more so that they weren't as bright white. I managed to achieve my desired look eventually by changing some of the settings around.

I then decided that the film title should have a tagline, and the question 'Who would you open the door to?' suited the title and my chosen image perfectly. Because this is only a tagline, I didn't feel it necessary for it to stand out as much as the title, however I did make it the same font.

Next I went onto dafont.com and downloaded the suggested font for the credits. Once I had done this it was relatively easy to come up with enough names for the different credits, and I got a good idea of where and how big they should be from looking at example posters.

Every film has an age rating and this must be shown on most, if not all, advertisements for the film in order to make it clear how old you must be to view it. Therefor next I went onto the British board of Film Classification website and found the symbol for the rating '18' as I think this is the suitable age rating for my film.

I then had to edit the symbol to get rid of the white background. To do this I copied and pasted the symbol into a new photoshop document and used the polygonal lasso tool to cut around the edges of the symbol. I then dragged it back onto my poster and positioned it where I thought it looked best. I also used 'free transform' to change the size as it looked slightly too big when I first added it to the poster.

I then added a date for the film to be released, and decided to make this the same day as halloween as my film is a horror and a lot of people enjoy going to watch a scary film on halloween. I also added a fake website for my film to make my poster even more realistic. Originally I used the website 'www.noescape.co.uk/dontopenthedoor', however after looking at some other examples of film posters, I realised that this was probably too complicated and changed it to 'www.noescapefilm.co.uk'.

At the beginning of my trailer the production company I made up is presented. It is called 'dollhouse productions', there is then a presentation of my other made up company called 'real cinema'. I have added these to the bottom of my poster.

Finally, I added some supposed magazine reviews of the film to the top of my poster with a five star rating from the magazine I have created as part of my promotional package. I didn't think there was enough colour in my poster and this prompted me to put the names of the magazines in red. To create the authentic five star rating, I went back onto 'dafont.com' and downloaded the font 'star things'. This font has a variety of different stars so I tried each of them and chose the one I found most appropriate and professional looking.