Film Poster - First Draft

This is the first draft of my film poster. As you can see it is not yet finished as I have yet to add elements such as the credits at the bottom of the page, and the main title still needs  some effects adding to make it blend with the rest of the poster better. However I think that I have made a good start to the poster. I have added grey clouds to the background to make the mise-en-scene more gloomy, fitting in with my genre conventions. Looking at my research I would say that my poster still has to be darker, but I have set a good foundation to work off. In my next draft I need to edit the colour of the grass to make it less vibrant. I will also add the names of my stars at the top and edit the title more.











MAKING THE FIRST DRAFT

Looking at my research and my planning I decided that I was going to use a grave stone as the center piece for my poster. As the plot of my film centers around a girl who has come back from the dead, I thought that the grave would be very effective. I started by taking some images of grave stones. I chose this one in particular as it has some very interesting textures and colours, which make it look old and slightly eroded.


This first image is good but I didn't end up using it as there was too much empty space around it which I had nothing to add to. Too much empty space makes for a boring poster.

This image was too close up and left no room for text either above or below it, which is what I had planned to do.

This one was taken with anticipation to add all of the text above it, but when I started putting my poster together I decided that there was too much room above it and I would not be able to fit it all with text, but if i did run out of room I would go back and perhaps re-consider this image.

This is the image that I eventually chose as I felt that it has just the right amount of space around it for adding text, but yet still close enough so that the audience can make out the smaller details.

This picture is used for the hand which is coming out from the ground beneath the grave. My research showed that this is an extremely common convention of horror film posters, using hands either coming up out of the ground or on someones face. Either way there are a lot of hands featured in film posters! So I decided to add one coming up from the ground beneath the grave as there  is a handy dip in the ground beneath the headstone where I could easily add it. I started by removing the background and shadow so that only the hand was visible. I then re-positioned the hand so that it was at a straight angle and added some effects. Looking at my research showed that the hand should be dull in colour with exaggeration to the contours and lines. To make my image look like this, I selected the "cartoon" tool which adds subtle yet noticeable lines to the dips and lines of the hand, and also a grainy texture to the skin. I then used the pain tool to add some blood stains. I used the eraser tool to place it behind the grass from the background photo to give the illusion that it is popping up out of the ground. I also added a shadow behind it to add more depth to the image. Without the shadow the hand looks as though it is on the grave rather than in front of it.

TEXT
Choosing a font for the text to go on the grave was difficult as I wanted it to be in an old English style font in order to fit in with the old grave stone. However, most of these fonts are very thin and so I could not achieve the desired chiseled in effect that I wanted to get, as I wanted to try and make the words look as though they were engraved into the stone. Here are some of the fonts that I experimented with:

After having no success with these fonts, I decided to move on to a bolder font. I looked in the "Horror" category on "dafont.com" which provided me with lots of different font styles. In the end I opted for the font seen below as it was bold enough to use for my effects, but also older looking at the same time.

To add the text and give it the desired effect I had to use different techniques creating shadows and editing the text. This helped me and up with the chiseled in effect for my font. Here is a tutorial showing the technique that I used to create this effect.