Ideas for the poster – aka, “Poster Ideas”

For the task following our film trailer, we have to design a film poster, and either a web page or a front cover for a film magazine featuring our film. Most of us have elected to do a front cover, since that’s a part of what we did last year, and will therefore be easier to do than a web page (of which many of us have little to no experience in doing). But first, the poster.

At the same time as I’m doing the poster design and ideas and whatnot, I’m also writing up an evaluation of the finished film trailer. However, since the film trailer is not entirely finished (the first draft of it is done, but we’re currently re-cutting it and adding other details in order to make it fit the time constraints and certain other conventions including the name of the studio behind the film), and until then I won’t be able to provide a proper evaluation. So until then, I’m working on getting the other tasks out of the way.

The first stage of doing this is obviously the planning. Instead of doing sketches with a pencil and pen, I instead spent a little while just messing around in MS Paint to come up with some basic ideas. They all had a similar theme – based around the image of playing cards, with a white background and colours mostly limited to either red or black, with a few of the main characters in the foreground, and the name of the film also visible in an eye-catching area of the poster, differing from poster to poster depending on the imagery in them.

The playing card symbols (spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts) are also important, as they are easily recognisable symbols and have obvious connotations with the act of gambling, and also mean that the actual image of a playing card is not needed in order to draw attention of the intended audience towards the central theme of gambling.

The fact of the matter is, however, that the ideas I’ve got so far are just that – ideas – and I still don’t know exactly what the final poster will look like. This is kind of a big deal, considering I don’t really have a lot of time to get it done. Well, I don’t have a lot of time to a) come up with an idea, b) relearn how to use Photoshop, c) get the photos I need, and then d) actually make a poster and magazine cover advertising a film that doesn’t exist.