Poster conventions

I’ve already done some previous research into the pan’s labyrinth poster to get ideas for the art of mine, like tone, colour etc but I haven’t really thought about the conventions. 

These are the two main pan’s labyrinth posters, one is promoting the film and it’s release and one is just generally promoting the film. The first poster has a release date on it which is a convention of film posters because the release date is important, however, depending on how early the poster is released there isn’t always a date available and so may say ‘coming soon’ or variations of that whereas the second poster doesn’t even contain a hint of release, its more focussed on intriguing the audience visually and drawing their attention to the reviews and stars, if the poster does that effectively then audience are pressumed to go off and find the release date themselves. Another reason may be that this poster was released after the film had been released and would therefore need no dat on it. Another important convention of a film poster is to have reviews from critics or well respected sources, because if someone admirable is impressed then that in itself has an impression upon the audience leading them to go and see the film. The first poster seems to be the more conventional of the two because another feature of many posters is to have a tagline (‘innocence has a power evil cannot imagine’) which although is different to the one in the trailer (‘what if make believe believes it’s real’) it can be the same, it just happens to be different on this particular poster – its because some movies have more than one tagline. It’s also common to mention the director of the movie as they are the one who creates the movie, it is essentially their movie although hundreds of people work on it, the directors name is usually fairly big and either placed with/near the title or with a whole load of credits of other important people who worked on the movie. – the credits also seem to be an important part of a poster but as they’re only acknowledging the people who worked on the movie rather than the actual movie itself, they’re pretty small because there’s normally a lot of names to fit on.

This coraline poster I thought was a good one to look at because it’s similar yet different to the pan’s labyrinth one. Obviously the images are different because the posters are advertising different movies, however like the pan’s labyrinth one it has a striking image, obviously has the title on there where it can be clearly seen, it has an intriguing tagline (‘some doors should never be opened’) gives some kind of a release date and mentions the director/writer, which comes just above the title. None of this information is usually placed exactly the centre of the poster because that’s usually where the images goes, it’s more commonly found either top centre, bottom centre or top/bottom and off to one of the sides like in the coraline one where the tagline is nearer the top but to the right hand side. The text in the pan’s labyrinth posters are definitely more central but are placed at the top and bottom of the pages which leaves plenty of space for the image to be the central object.

TOTAL FILM magazine cover conventions

The first thing I noticed about the TOTAL FILM covers was that they tended to only have an image of the feature film and just text rather than a mix of smaller images too to advertise other content, like in these >>>

However there are more conventional looking covers, they are pretty much the same as empire, cluttered with text and images, a main feature covering the most space and overlapping with the title, barcode and price pretty small and usually along the side. Here’s some more examples >>>

There are some colour themes apppearing in some editions, like the ‘sherlock holmes’ one and the cover featuring ‘king kong’ however the extra images on the covers are few and minor, this is the major difference between total film and empire, not that it’s a major issue thought because with images and without images seems to work for the individual magazines. Unlike with empire magazine, there doesn’t seem to be an archive of past covers so I don’t know if there are any special edition total film covers, the normal editions all seem to follow a similar pattern in the look though.

EMPIRE magazine cover conventions

 This is a typical Empire magazine cover (they also have special edition versions some of which i’ll show later) – The chosen image is obviously very striking in order to capture the publics attention not just because it’s of an iconic character (because a lot of new films would potentially be advertised and no – one would recognise them) but it’s also subtle in the way it doesn’t really tell you about the new film which again is a reason for people to want to buy it, to discover the synopsis. Because it’s a film magazine it isn’t genre specific however the cover does have a running theme linking to the featured movie – in this case it carries out the colours of the main image like the red of spider-man’s costume and the blue and gold glows from the sky. By only the hand of the figure in the image as black it makes that particular feature stand out – the text referring to that feature is also in black creating that link. The arrangement of all the information within the frame is also done well – most of the space is taken with advertising the feature film (spider-man3 in this case) and the reast of the information is displayed at the bottom of the page kind of creeping up the right side leaving a subtle little gap for a barcode on the left – somewhere not majorly noticeable hinting at it’s insignificance compared to the content of the magazine. Obviously the editors want the audience to see the other information on the cover so the text is quite bold in order to make it readable but it’s not displayed as the feature. A common feature of many empire coveres including this one is that the main image obstructs the magazine title is some kind of way, not so it’s unreadable but so the image overlaps it in some place, it doesn’t matter that the title is layered with an image because the title is big, it pretty much fills the width of the page and is coloured a bright red which stand out against fairly dark toned background which a lot of the main images have.

These two have similar features, for example, the main image overlaps the magazine title in some way and ‘the joker’ cover like the spiderman one has a colour theme of pink and purple which is taken from aspects of the main image. The hobbit isn’t as obvious as this, some of the other text is highlighted by a banner the same colour as the films title but the smaller amount of information at the bottom is in red which relates to itself but not to the feature movie. On ‘the hobbit’ cover there is a banner advertising other features which has been placed behind the main image with a different feature either side, this has been done other empire covers like these ones >>>

You can also get special edition covers of magazines, for example, the covers above seem to be of high quality because they are thick and glossy unlike cheaper magazines however certain editions of empire such as the ‘icons of the decade’ edition look like this >>>

The image makes it look like a normal edition but the grey background is actually extra shiny, almost mirror like and reflective, the shinyness makes it look different and stand out among the normal editions. It keeps to paticular colour theme of red, white and black so that the text stands out and obviously the main image is unlike the background so that stands out too. – They usually do a series of different special edition covers to advertise the same feature so that it opens up to a wider audience and also so people try and collect them all which potentially means more money >>>

 Another kind of special edition cover is to just feature one movie, for example >>>

This is purely advertising one movie and the cover is made to become more like a poster with the title being torn apart with the rest of the image so that the whole cover is one image rather than lots. The only text is movie title at the bottom and the bar code. However, what makes this edition special like the shiny cover on the other editions is that this is actually in 3d.

General magazine cover conventions apply here too, like the text should be bold, readable, bright and depending on what feature the text is refering to then a variety in size. The page as a whole is usually cluttered with information and pictures, like an organised mess, there is most likely some kind of banner and the very top or very bottom of the page with more, but brief advertisments of the content.

In terms of actual text, I briefly mentioned variation in font sizes, bright colours, readable, it should be short, informative but also interesting so that people look at the cover and want to read it – words like 

and many more all sound intriguing and appealing to audiences.

Empire cover archive

Empire is a prime example of an excellent film magazine so here is a link to it’s very useful website where you can view every empire amgazine cover from 1989 – now! >>> 

http://www.empireonline.com/magazine/covers/gallery.asp?GID=1362

Front cover of a magazine

As well as poster we have to design the front cover of a magazine which advertises the film which we made a trailer for. Here’s what ehow says about making a magazine cover >>>

http://www.ehow.com/how_4431861_create-magazine-cover-photoshop.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_4471392_create-magazine-cover.html

There are alot more, these are just samples of what you can find on ehow

http://www.slideshare.net/guest78c406/codes-and-conventions-of-promotional-film-material-2668179 <<< this is something extra found on another site

Movie poster

The next part of the coursework is to create a poster to fit alongside the teaser trailer aswell as a magazine. I started by looking on the infamous ehow.com so here’s a few out of a lot of interesting pages on making movie posters that could potentially help >>>

http://www.ehow.com/how_2304857_make-movie-poster.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_4817640_create-own-movie-posters.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_4780323_make-movie-posters-using-photoshop.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_4881834_make-simple-movie-poster.html

The film’s title

The good thing about my trailer is that it contains no dialogue so I could name the film whatever i wanted, like give it a foreign title. On my ‘final version’ the title is written in spanish (la sombra de muneca which in english is ‘the doll shadow’ for obvious reasons), however I may change it to english because all the title screens are english and it may be better to be consistent through thr trailer – there’s the possibility of changing the title screens inot spanish but not speaking it myself it could be a difficlt task to be accurate. With the Pan’s labyrinth trailer all the title screens and even the title is in english so it doesn’t give away the fact that it’s actually a spanish film which is a route I could try but I quite like how the spanish title looks – it makes you think about the film differently.

I researched the Pan’s labyrinth title and the film is named so because Pan is the name of the ancient greek God Pan who took the form of a faun – hence the faun character, however the director has said that the faun in the film isn’t pan and despite the english title in spanish the title is el laberinto del fauno which literally translated read ‘the labyrinth of the faun’. I like how they are not toally the same but i think to go these lengths for my trailer may be quite extreme – i do like how each language has their own title though.

Final version?

I think I have pretty much finished my trailer, there my be small details i change in the near future as i begin to create the poster and magazine but here’s the ‘final’ version >>>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e51FNK1iMZY

third version of trailer

The clips in this version are pretty much the same as the other version however the music is finally finished so i’ve added the newer music into this trailer. The difference is that the vocals have been put way in to the background, some of the riffs are slightly louder, some recording stops have been taken out, the drums build quieter and the wind at the end has been made a little louder, however that’s still difficult to hear >>>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCd5GCD53gk

Latest version of trailer and sound

I’ve finally finished editing the timing of my trailer to fit the music (which means some the transitions and timings of clips are different to pan’s labyrinth which is what i wanted because i didnt want it to be an exact copy). Some the clips still need editing however and parts of the music need editing to but only volume and echo so it shouldnt effect the timing at all >>>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6cDKocloek