I had a very clear idea about what I wanted my poster to look like, as you can see in a rough plan I have produced below. The idea was for a black background and a white semicircle, imitating a spotlight. The central image would be rising out of the white and going into the black, this central image would cover a large portion of the canvas, I had this idea after being inspired by the Ex Machina poster and the Scarface poster both of which contain a simple colour scheme, white and black and a key central image which takes up the majority of the page. I had the idea for the title to be red, again inspired from the Ex Machina poster along with other thriller posters such as Eastern Promises and Taken, where the red text on the black background is very striking and denotes a large variety of things primarily danger and blood.
My first draft that I created was fairly faithful to my plan though I faced some difficulties in my central image, as I was unable to find one that was a good enough quality to fit the whole page, therefore I went for the image of the girl and the main character.
In order to incorporate the ink I placed it below the title using a clipping mask, giving the title some much needed texture and helped to bring it out. The font which is currently used is not the final one.
In the three drafts above you can see a slightly more polished version. The billing block, names and certificate have all been filled in along with some slight fading around the edges creating a fade effect when moving from the white. I became worried about the black space and wanted to try and fill it. I had the idea of using the ink along the sides though I had great difficulty in removing all the background from the picture and wasn't too happy with the final result as I felt it looked too biological for the genre of film we were going for and didn't really work.
This draft included a large amount of changes. Firstly I changed the font into the one I will be using, I'm extremely happy with it as it makes the poster look far more professional. As I was still unhappy with black space, I needed something to fill the black space. I thought that darkening the ink and layering it on top of each other would produce something resembling smoke and add a bit of texture to the back. I was very happy with how it turned out however more polishing is obviously needed. I added the two other men in the middle of the poster in order to fill it out further, I thought by making that darker it will make them appear to be more sinister and also appear to be appearing out of the smoke/ink.
The next two drafts are far loser to the final product. I have made the text at the top grey as it looks more professional on the background along with moving the certification into the title and hiding it slightly. I have slightly blurred all of the edges around the ink to make it seem slightly more natural, however more work may be needed on that. A decision was made to add the reviews to further fill out the poster and not leave any wasted space. I debated whether it looked better to have words or simply the laurel leaves, I later decided on the latter as it looks more neater and uses up less space.
Above you can see virtually the final product, I'm extremely happy with it and how similar I managed to get it to my original plan. I feel it looks professional while also looking slightly dis-similar from other film posters that I have seen
Above you can see the final poster, from my audience feedback I discovered a huge error which was the mis-spelling of the lead actors name, although this wouldn't have been the worst mistake as many people wouldn't have noticed or cared it is still very important that all the information on the poster is correct
AF
