Post 19: Ancillary Task 1 - Postcards

Film posters and postcards are commonly used by studios to help advertise their films to a wide range of people that may not learn about it in any other way.

Hollywood posters are conventionally large and eye catching using the large budgets that they have been given. They often the well-known actor or actress in the centre because the studios know that they have a large fan base and so will attract audiences. Along with an image of a well-known actor there will often by the names of all the larger and better-known actors names to entice more people. As well as this the title is central to the poster and in promoting the film so is always in bold and in an obvious place so people can see what the film is called just by glancing at the poster.

Below is a picture of the poster of the film The Dark Knight (2008), I have annotated it to show some of the different techniques used to grab the audience’s attention and techniques that give the audience information about the film:

  

British posters are typically different to American ones; however, there are a few British posters that have the characteristics of American posters. An example of this is the Les Miserables (2012) film poster which can be seen below.

A British film that takes a different approach is This Is England (2006). As seen there is a dominating photo but that is of all the characters not just one main one, the title of the film grabs the audiences' attention first due to it being bold and big. Along with this it shows some successes of the film, that could potentially help persuade potential viewers to go and watch it. The picture below shows how I annotated this film poster, highlighting the techniques:

 

 

Short films don’t tend to have posters to advertise them but rather post cards. Postcards are considered a more direct technique when targeting short film audiences.

Conventionally short film postcards consist of a dominating photo on the front that is related to the film, but also eye catching, and on the back there is a bit more information. This information could include the names of the people involved in making the film and the distribution company’s’ that helped in promoting the film, it may also include a website that the audience can go onto to find out more information. These are two postcards that I have annotated to show some on the conventions used in promoting short films.

Divine

On A Life's Edge

However even though most short films use postcards to advertise and sell their film to the audience, we have decided to create a poster for Behind Blue Eyes. Below is my rough plan of what I think our poster should look like.