For this task we have to put in a lot of research, as it has to be appropriate for our target audience, and also promote our film well. So that's why I'm researching in to the marketing of a film similar to ours, so that it can inspire us when it comes to making our movie poster. The film that we have decided to look in to is Fight Club, as we feel that it is most like our film in terms of atmosphere, protagonist, etc. This is the trailer below for Fight Club, which reminds me of Dave due to it's depressing feel and main character who is fed up with his boring corporate job:
We can draw parallels to Fight Club and our film, as the main character (The Narrator) creates a fictional character in his head named Tyler Durden, who, as the audience finds out, is just himself. Because The Narrator is lonely and unhappy with his life, he imagines something more exciting in his life, to get away from reality. The protagonist in our film also dreams up a new life, to get away from his equally boring life in an office. Because the main character isn't given a name, he represents all of the working men who hate their office jobs. We have followed that, by not giving Dave any dialogue, so that the film isn't focusing on his personality so much, but more focused on the storyline. It also means that our character is also a representative of men bored with their corporate jobs.
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| Fight Club's film poster |
The Narrator is also wearing a suit which has a smear of blood by the collar, his tie is loose showing that he is not interested in the job he has. As our main character wears a suit we decided to give him a slack tie to show disinterest and money hanging out of his pocket, foreshadowing his possible future affluence.
For the poster we want to create a picture that shows Dave being really bored and gives you a feel that this film is going to be about Dave's life and makes you interested to see why he's so bored, and what changes in his life that could potentially turn things around.
A challenge we faced with advertising for this film is that standard conventions for catching people's eyes involve using interesting and captivating images, however the premise of our film relies on the stereotypical "Grindstone" of life and so having advertisements that relate to the film involve a similar, dull manner. An interesting twist to this is perhaps showing Dave as a silhouette with a shadow, thus concealing information from the viewer and conveying Dave as a "Ciphon" of the modern citizen.
The poster for the "Shaun of the Dead' poster is brilliant for what the film is about and it's a perfect representation for what the film is about:
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| Shaun of the Dead's movie poster |
Within the image there are lots of subtle features that relate to the events in the story, for example the flowers that are for his mother are the most vivid, colourful section of the frame but until you've watched the film they have little meaning, this inclusion of events yet to happen augments a theme of familiarity with the audience that could potentially bring them back to watch again the film and motivate a nostalgic response.
After researching on the internet for other possible movie posters to work from, I found this slideshow which analyses existing movie posters and conventions. I thought it would be very useful to help us.
Film poster codes and conventions from Nadine
Conclusively for our film poster we have decided on using minimalistic imagery to pique interest in our audience and persuade them to watch our film by inspiring questions that they feel need to be answered, we are going to do this by using an image of Dave and convert it into a silhoutte, after that we will apply a shadow to him and have him off centre. The title "Dave" will be printed clearly and boldly across the top, as well as Nazario Jackson's name. Across the bottom we will have a caption depicting the foundation of the film and print credits for the technical crew and production team.
Poster Construction
We began constructing our poster on Photoshop. I had never used photoshop before, but Connor knew how to use it so he was able to help us with it.
To begin with we chose our own colour theme for the poster, we created this grey/white transient background to portray dullness, it also has a deep symbolic meaning in that in portrays the "clouds" above Dave's head, as we intend to place a silhouette of Dave in the frame. Next we styled our title "Dave" to appear in the top third of the poster.
After creating the title we wrote the actors name above it, we saw this as a convention in other posters we have analysed and decided that as our film is named after the protagonist, it is a good opportunity to use the convention.
We also coined the caption "An Ordinary Man, An Extraordinary Day", we felt this defined our film very well and also is intriguing for the audience.
We continued work on the bottom half of the poster, this includes the slogan and the production credits, we added the 2 logos onto the bottom of the credits to apply conventions of popular posters. We also added the phrase "Based on everyone's life... ever", as it relates to the audience and anyone who has a mundane career.
Our final addition to the poster is of our own image, in which we manipulate a body image to look like a silhouette and give it a shadow, thus filling the blank space in the middle left of the page. We took our own image (not of Nazario Jackson) and manipulated it to prevent plagiarism.
Here is step by step how we did it:
After we put in the shadow for Dave's silhouette, our poster is completed for enough to begin gathering feedback from our peers.
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| Rough draft of the film poster |
Our peers gave us the following feedback to act upon:
- To make the THX and DOLBY DIGITAL logos smaller on the bottom, it looks to heavy.
- To put a shadow on the top caption and title "Dave" to add depth, as Dave has a shadow but the text has no depth.
- Some text to state when the film is coming out, perhaps "Coming soon".
- To change the title "An ordinary man, an extraordinary day" to "One ordinary man, one extraordinary day" so that it matches the magazine reviews quote subtitle.
- To change the top caption so that it goes over 2 lines, as it is quite close to the edge. Could also move everything down to remove the empty space.
- The quote "Based on everyone's life...ever" needs to be a darker colour so that people can see it. We considered the aspect of a bright sunny day and no one being able to view the poster due to it's subtle colour contrasts.
Evaluation Of Feedback
As a group we agreed with every point here, after reshaping the THX logo and Dolby Digital logo we added the text "Coming soon". We also gave the title and caption more depth by applying a light shadow, along with changing the caption to match the review. It was a challenge to split the caption onto two lines as we did not like the weighting of the poster after we did it as we had to move the title down, though this removed the blank space and allowed the caption to be in the "print-zone". Then we changed the colour of the slogan to make it more viewable. Our finished product looks much more professional and we all agree with it and believe it is good.
To improve our product we could have changed the shadow of Dave to be holding some money, which is impossible to occur as the real Dave holds no money, however it would suggest to the audience that interesting things are going to happen to Dave to do with finance, it would also have a deeper symbolic meaning as Dave encounter's wealth in his dream, which isn't real and therefore correlates to his shadow having money.
Conclusively, our product is a powerful advertisement tool for our film and it relates well to the content of the life and the themes we already have - such as greyscale settings; a main character who is seemingly a template for all mundane careers; and a very minimalistic setup.
Final Product
After changing everything in our poster, our final product looks like this:
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| Final draft of the poster |
