Research on Posters

Whilst in the process of creating my own film poster, I looked at several real production posters to help meet the conventions. The first poster campaign I looked at ‘I am Legend’ and as we were making a postmodern dystopia themed text, we could draw possible ideas from it. What we wanted to create was an apocalyptic style poster, where our protagonist would be walking through the deserted streets of London, etc…


Therefore, analysing the ‘I am Legend’ posters one thing you instantly notice is how cohesive the four posters our shown below. The logo always at the middle bottom and actor ‘Will Smith’ name in bold capitals remains at the top. Also, the slogan in black always remains at the bottom of the actor name as well as the omnipresent production name/companies always at the bottom of every poster. I also liked the colour scheme and choice of setting they have chosen, for example the consistent dark orange and yellow with the black shadow around the edges enhances the mystery within the poster. The director chose to you use the destroyed Brooklyn Bridge because it is iconic. When viewers see the devastation, questions are immediately raised as to how that had happened and gets people into cinemas. Lastly, the same image of Will Smith features on each poster which makes the poster consistent, so viewers can easily identify the movie.

Furthermore, the second marketing strategy ‘I am Legend’ had was to create several foreign posters which would gain exposure from countries across the world. They uniquely chose to destroy iconic buildings across various countries, for example the destroyed London Bridge in England and the Eiffel Tower in France shown above. This shows that ‘I am Legend’ is marketing to a wide range of audiences and not just America through its unique strategy. The consistency continues with the same dark orange shown in the previous posters. Whereas, the production logos kept always to the left and name of actor and title kept also depending on the nature of the image. This was an idea I immediately wanted to replicate.

Cloverfield:


The Cloverfield marketing campaign received brilliantly reviews, as the poster and teaser trailer alone played an influential part getting people into cinemas. The teaser ended with the iconic head of the statue of liberty crashing into the streets of New York. The trailer simply ended with date the film was coming out without the mention of the name of the film. This created an immediate buzz across the internet as viewers were wondering, what it was they just watched? Nonetheless, the poster answered many wuestions with the statyue of liberty missing it’s head with skyline of New York with smoke descending at a distance. The same date appeared but this time with the name of the film with the heading at the top, ‘Something has Found Us’. This then made it evident to me that it was important that my teaser trailer was cohesive with my poster.


The Book of Eli


I looked at various posters, but the last poster that stood out to me was ‘The Book of Eli’ foreign poster. I feel the poster works perfectly conveying an apocalyptic theme and what we were setting out to do. We see Denzel Washington’s character looking vulnerable across a destroyed city, filled with destroyed cars, roads covered in debris and dilipdated buildings in the distance. This gave me an idea to create my own version with my character centred overlooking a destroyed London skyline. I also noticed the actors name and title were all in Japanese and the company names and logos always remain at the bottom even on foreign posters.