Constructing a Film Poster

Here I will be analysing the construction of film posters using "April Showers" as an example.

Film posters typically consist of a few overlayed images; occasionally screen-grabs from the film but more frequently purposely taken photographs. These photographs are often planned so the film poster can accurately convey the attitude of the film. Various text such as the film title, unique actors and producers and sometimes a sentence, like a slogan, to set the mood of the film is used.

The imagery tends to be somewhat symmetrical and composed to lead the eye from the top of the poster all the way to the bottom. In this finished poster we can see the characters line-of-sight going down; imaginary lines like this lead the viewer's eye downwards. The large, red title then catches the eye, followed by more imagery. The next piece of text consists of producer and actor names; these producers and actors however are not unique selling points and as a result they have been written in a subtle, brown font that blends in with the background. This is done so people can still read and refer to this text but it does not easily catch the eye. The final part of the poster is the contrasting white text at the bottom, displaying the date of release. Unlike some posters, this one has no need to write the release date in a large font size, as the poster has been cleverly constructed to lead the eye to it.

This poster has been constructed using five different layers; four pictures and an overlay of text.

The first picture taken is the main background; a sunset-lit sky with medium contrast and warm tones to bring to mind connotations such as heaven, sorrow, peace and the end of something.

This next picture used is from a scene in the film. It is used as the primary visual transition between imagery and text due to how it occupies horizontal space and consists of a highly-exposed top-half and an under-exposed bottom half. Using images like this with a gentle transition from light-to-dark avoids high-contrast images being used as high-contrast images will draw attention to themselves and nothing else.

This picture is of a main character in the film. Hi facial expressions suit the sad nature of the film and the background around him does not harshely interfere with his clothes - for this reason he can easily be cut-out of a picture and used as a layer for the final poster.

To cut-out parts of each image two fairly universal tools are used in many different programs. Very often a "magic tool" (1) is used by selecting the tool and simply clicking on the subject - the tool will then determine the contrast and colour values of each pixel and will select all nearby parts of the image to the subject that do to have exceptionally different contrast and colour values to their neighbour pixels. Another common tool is the "loop tool" which is used by manualling moving the mouse around the image to select an area. This process requires precision and often zooming-in is needed to ensure the user is accurate to the pixel. Editing feathering properties or using layer masks (I am using GIMP here) allows for smooth effect or crop transitions rather than rigid, accurate to-the-pixel crops.

Here the tools can be used again to use the subject's face for the final poster image.



Here is the final construction of the image before text is overlayed.

Appropriate text is add and the final poster is produced.