Poster Design

This project was to take an existing film and try to alter it's genre and convey it through a poster. My first idea was to take The Matrix and change it's genre into a romantic comedy, researching into poster conventions it was clear that there are three basic conventions that need to be included.
1. Is to have both protagonists back to back, expressing that 'they are different' or will have a disagreement but at the end it will all work out. This also conveys the light heartedness of the film.
2. Is to use contrasting, bright colours which connote joy and love. (e.g blue and red)
3. Is to have a soft background, single colour such as white or have a romantic setting such as a beach.

Taking this into account, I wanted to put a comical spin on the poster so I chose the protagonist Neo and the Antagonist Agent Smith to be the two characters within the poster.

Following the conventions, I felt a nice city background would set the scene. However, the colours are very dark and menacing. The colour of the text is also very hard to read, and doesn't contrast well with the background.

So, looking at more posters I came to the conclusion to keep it simple and use a single colour background:

The light blue colour contrasts perfectly with the text and the characters. Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven (Taken from Colour wreel pro website). These symbols are generally present within rom-coms and I felt it was beneficial to use for my poster.

Within this poster, I went for the back to back look for both comedic and conventional purposes. It was very difficult to find an image of both characters not looking so sinister, however it worked out well because the blank emotions adds comedic value to the change in genre for this film.

Tag lines are common within posters:

Taking a line from the film, 'he's the one' and twisting it to fit in with the the rom-com genre. Again this adds comical value to the poster, as well as depicting a potential relationship between the two protagonists.

During the making of this poster, I used images from the internet and cut them out using the magnetic lasso tool on photoshop:

This was probably the one tool I used the most and the most useful, as it makes cutting images so much easier.

My next idea was to take 'The Inbetweeners Film' and change the genre into a Western Film. So looking closely on google at Western posters, I decided to make the design of the poster into a 'wanted' poster.

Firstly I had to create a template for the images to be on, making the style and colour look warn out and rustic such as wanted posters would have looked like.

What I did to create this was to first make the background a very light orange colour, then using the burn tool:

I burnt off the edges and added a few light splodges around the page. Using the eraser tool, I erased the out line of the poster to give it a warn out look. I also used the drop shadow effect, to make it stand out from the white background.

I then searched for an appropriate font, and found a perfect one on photoshop that looked like the old western print:

Once I had the basics done, I then had to add the images of the actors on to the poster. Again, I took images from google and using the magnetic tool cut out what I needed and then placed it on to my poster. Once I had the images lined up, I need to change the colour to make it match with the sepia style.

Firstly, for each image, I changed the tone from their original bright colours to a monotone of black and white.

Once I had the image as Black & White, I then had to change the saturation:

Once I had all the saturation levels correct for each image, I then blurred them slightly and the text to give it a further warn out look.
Keeping to the conventions of posters, I added the title of the film to the bottom in a large font size, added the actors name and a tag line: