Final 'Lullaby' poster

After making all of the preparation for the poster, I started to put it all together. I started with the image which I took into photoshop and created its own layer. I then drew a text box and added the title 'Lullaby'. I chose a white colouring for the font, as this contrasted best with the background. Red is another popular choice for this text (as you can see in my previous post) but due to the fact that the blood is red on the hand, I didn't want to overload the use of the colour, which would take the focus away from the blood.

I thought this looked okay as it was, but was lacking in something, so I added a motion blur to the font, (by 500 pixels on the horizontal axis, and 20 pixels on the vertical axis). I felt like this gave a ghostly feel to it, which suits the storyline to our film. 

I then created the billing block for the bottom of the poster on another photoshop document, which is a common feature to most film posters. I did this by downloading another font, and a template which allowed me to simply fill in the gaps of where text could be personalised to our own film. I then made the background transparent, and changed the colour of the text from black to white, in order to contrast well with the background, and not to contrast too much with the font of the main film title. Also, white is the typical colour choice for the billing block (again, this is evident in my previous post). 

Due to the fact that there has only been me and Ashleigh creating this trailer, I used only our two names (apart from Ellie and Holly's name, who we added to the actresses section). This looks unusual for a normal billing block, as there are usually a lot more names which make their appearance on here. 

As our trailer would probably be an independant film, I decided to add the logos of film festivals such as the logo from the Cannes film festival and the Tribeca film festival logo. I google searched the logos, then saved them and opened them up into photoshop. I then made the backgrounds transparent and inverted the colours, so they turned from black into white. This would fit with the colour theme of my poster. I placed them onto my poster, and fitted them into appropriate spaces in my billing block (which is a common place for film festival logos). 

There still seemed to be something missing, so I looked at the images I had gathered from Google images, and saw that on many of them, a piece of text stating the directors of the film ('A film by...') was placed above the title. I added a text box with this text onto the poster, and changed the sized of the fonts accordingly. I felt that this seemed to fit well onto the poster. 

At this point, I quite liked the poster how it was, however, I added the final touches by adding a vignette to the edges. I copied the original layer of the image and then drew a circle around the edge. Then, I feathered the edges by 200 pixels. I inverted the circle, and then lowered the brightness. This produced a very faint vignette, which was minimal, but was quite effective. 

I also added a small piece of text underneath the billing block 'Coming Soon', which is another feature that I have found common on film posters in general. I made the text red, using the pipette tool I managed to get a similar colour to the colour of the blood. This maintained the colour theme. Here is the final poster that I created;

Film Poster font options

Another important component of a film poster is the choice of font. I didn't want to use a font that was unprofessional looking like Times New Roman or Comic Sans, so I decided to look on font website 'Dafont' for suitable options. There were so many options on this website, and I wasn't sure whether to use a serif or sans serif font, so I did a simple google search for 'Horror film posters'. Here are some of the posters that I saw;

As you can see, serif fonts seem to be the most popular for horror film posters, so I looked on the serif section of Dafont. I narrowed it down to 3 fonts, which looked like this;

Although they all look relatively similar, I decided to go with the middle one because of the enlarged first letter. I really like this font as it is quite bold and looks the most professional. 

Poster Mock up

Before starting to create my poster, I made a mock up of how I wanted it to look. This plan will help me to focus my ideas to a point where I know exactly what I want to do. I made this mock up in publisher, which is very simplistic. After looking at my posters inspiration and deciding on what photograph to use, I planned out where I wanted the image, title and billing block to be.

Poster photograph edit

After I decided which photograph I wanted to use on the poster, I edited it in photoshop to make it look more appropriate for a horror genre poster. First of all, I removed any blemishes from the hand using the spot healing tool, which took away imperfections such as the drop of fake blood near the top of the hand. Next, I selected the skin of the hand and deselected the blood. 

Then, I used the desaturation tool to make her skin look less alive and more like a dead and lifeless hand which was the concept behind this photograph - this is the hand of the dead girl from the trailer, which actually links with the shot of the same hand dripping blood. After desaturating the skin, I then altered the brightness and contrast accordingly, making the blood a deeper red and more realistic (previously, the fake blood looked to bright which made it look actually fake). Below is the original image and the final image which I will use for my poster. 

Poster photoshoot

During one of our filming sessions, I took several photographs on one of the shoots. This shoot was from this scene that will be featured in our trailer of a hand dripping with blood. As I took the photographs, it became clear that I used the inspiration from the 'Let the Right One In' illustrated poster that I had seen before. On my the hand (of my sister, who is one of the main characters in our trailer) we used fake blood that we had bought in a shop to create a realistic consistency and colour, rather than trying to make our own synthetic blood. As the blood trickled down her hand, I managed to capture the moments as it dripped, producing these images; 

It took a while to set up the composition of the photograph the way I wanted it, because the hand kept making strange shapes that did not resemble a hand at all (more like a claw). I directed my sister, and poured over the blood myself, before taking this photograph. I also took it in the late afternoon after I got in from school, so the lighting was not ideal as it was a bit dark, however, this created a more eerie feel as the deep red of the blood strongly contrasts against the blue/ purple of her hand and the background. My favourite of these shots is the second to last one as the drop of the blood is in the position that I wanted - the drop is suspended in motion which is what I hoped to capture. This photograph suggests death, without showing the explicit image of a dead body, which may be too horrific for a poster which could be displayed in public places. I will later edit this photo in photoshop to enhance the red of the blood, desaturate the colour of the skin (to make it look more dead) and to remove any blemishes from the hand, and add the necessary components to make the photo into a film poster. 

Let the Right One In Poster Analysis

After doing research into horror film posters, I found the illustrative poster for the 2008 film, 'Let the Right One In' to be particularly inspirational. Here is my analysis of the poster on Flickr. I hope to use this as inspiration for my own poster, as I really like the use of contrasting colours and the use of blood to implicate death without the explicit image of a dead body. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoeradford/12818949874/

Poster inspiration

As well as our film trailer, I wanted to begin to look at inspiration for my ancillary products; my magazine cover and film poster. I started off by looking at film posters for 'Let the Right One In', from which we gained inspiration for our trailer, and I found many interesting film posters for the film (as shown below).

I like these posters as they give a feeling of mystery - the face of the main characters are hidden/ distorted and in the last poster, they are not shown at all. Instead, the focus is on the hands of the characters, and the colours in all posters are desaturated, apart from the vibrant red blood in the third one. I also really like the composition of the last one, with the drop of blood suspended in the air. I will use these as inspiration for my poster.

Draft of our trailer

This is one of the drafts of our trailer - the editing of the visuals in the trailer is almost complete, however the sound is still unfinished. We are unsure how to edit the sound from that point, and so we will ask our peers for their opinion and change it accordingly. 

As you can see, we have stuck to most of the ideas that we originally looked at in the storyboards, however, we have then developed these ideas and added more shots (for example the enitre piano scene). I think that by adding these scenes, more tension has been created. 

Spectre House Ident

After looking at the Napoleon Dynamite introduction scene, we have had an idea for our trailer ident. As it would most likely be an independent film, we wanted to create something that gave it a slightly independant feel to it. We wanted to create some sort of either stop motion or animation clip of film, where the name of our production company 'Spectre house Productions' would appear, and we decided to have a go at making a flip book. I recently bought a small book which could be used in this way, which had squared paper (to help to keep the titles the same size) and a flexible cover so that it could bend appropriately. As with the Napoleon Dynamite title sequence, we wanted the ident to have a handmade element to it, but for it not to look as cheerful as that did, so we made the font look handwritten, but not in the pretty looking curly fonts that Napoleon Dynamite uses. Also, we considered the colours of the ident - we didn't want there to be a lot of bright primary or pastel colours as we felt that it would look too much like the ident of a comedy, romance or teen movie, so considering that the flip book was orange, we placed it on a black background (orange and black are colours that, when combined, are often associated with halloween, which is linked to the horror genre). Below is the original out take of our ident (the clip looks best played in 1080pHD).

Clearly, the length of our ident is far too long, so we had a go of editing it to see what it would look like sped up. Below is the first clip that we had a go of speeding up, which was edited in Windows Live Movie Maker.

As you can see, the clip looks slightly disjointed. We later had a go of editing it in iMovie, which produced a much more fluid flow, so we will be using this for our ident. Also, when we edited the clip in iMovie, the sound sped up too (which was originally just the ambient noise of the television in the background). This created quite a creepy, squeaky/ scratchy effect which seemed to fit into the horror genre quite well. We kept this noise in the background.

Art of the Title - Research for our Production Company Ident

Recently, I watched film 'Napoleon Dynamite' (2004), and I was inspired by the opening title sequence to the film. Obviously this film is an 'indie' comedy (which actually screened at the Sundance film festival), and so the title sequence is light hearted and quirky, and although we are producing a horror film trailer, I liked the unusual quality that it had. We researched the title sequence and found an article explaining how the title sequence was filmed with extremely low budget in a basement. Due to the fact that our trailer is a horror trailer, our ident would have to be much darker, but we liked the independent feel to it. We may use this as inspiration for our own ident, obviously making a short sequence that is more suited to the horror genre. Below is a link to the article explaining about the title sequence and the full video.

Napoleon Dynamite (2004) — Art of the Title