Poster - Initial Ideas and Influences

In order to do research for our film poster we looked at several films in the same genre such as drama/thrillers and psychological films. Because although our film is a psychological drama with elements of thriller we didn't want a poster that was too scary or gave off an impression of a different genre. We also wanted to see similar posters that just had one characters face or the character with a very plain background.

One idea we have is to feature Noah alone on the poster and cover his mouth somehow to symbolise his silence and inability to speak. We would either do this with some form of material over his mouth or maybe using photoshop get rid of his mouth. Here are some of our influences:

Silence of the Lambs is such an iconic film as is the poster made for the film. Although we were thinking of possibly having a photo of our main protagonist, Noah, with his mouth covered by something, we feel that we would need to use lighting and photoshop very carefully as we don't want to make it look too scary like these two posters.

Silent Hill is also a horror film which you can see from the poster due to the photo and also the font used for the title. Although we think this looks very effective as they have completely gotten rid of the mouth of the little girl rather than covering it with an object or a piece of material. They have also used an effect to make the girl's face appear as though it has been cracked which again gives away the genre of the film, horror.

Another problem we faced when deciding on initial designs for our poster was that we were unsure of whether to create a poster featuring a photograph or whether to have an iconic symbol showing themes of the film rather than any characters. Examples of this are:

We really liked all of these posters because they are very minimalistic but effective in showing the genre of the film without revealing the plot or any of the characters.

After seeing these posters, we decided to search for other minimalistic posters and found a large collection of them that people have made for several famous films. These were never official posters for the films as many of them only display a logo or image relating to the film, however we think that they look very stylistic and unique. Here are some of the ones that we thought were very clever and particularly liked.

Although we thought these minimalistic posters were very different and edgy we did decide that they only really worked because the films are already very well known and have distinctive concepts. For example when looking at the breakfast club poster, shown above, to someone who has seen the film it is an extremely clever representation of what the film is about. However for audiences that are not familiar with the film or the storyline it may come across as confusing and there could be misinterpretation of what the poster is showing.

As a result of our research and planning for our poster we decided on a more naturalistic approach and chose to use photography and photoshop to make it.