POSTER - Final Feedback

The final feedback.
Jagged outline or blurred outline on sun?
Here is the final feedback from my teacher for the final draft. She personally liked the blurred sun style choice, but, as she noted, it was her personal preference, and so I kept the jagged sun, as I felt it sort of tied in more with the overall style.

However there were some things I couldn't keep the same: standard industry size of the certification box is about 50% smaller than what I currently had it as. So that had to change.

Finally, she suggested scaling down the 'Empire' review at the top of the page, although, after testing this idea, I felt it slightly ruined the symmetry of the poster, so I changed it back.

And here it is!

POSTER - Second Draft

POSTER - Adding information

As you can see from my poster pitches, I have a lot more to add and change before I can have any sort of completed poster.

TAG LINE
BILLING INFORMATION
CRITIC QUOTES
CERTIFICATION

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines

Here is the classification webpage.

The issues that could be relevant to my film, in the guidelines, are:

Imitable behaviour, Violence.

According to BBFC:

Imitable behaviour is:

Dangerous behaviour (for example, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on detail which could be copied, or appear pain or harm free. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.

I think the cigar smoking in my film could be considered as imitable behaviour. The antagonist and protagonist both smoke cigars, so I think this raises the age to 15.

Violence is:

Moderate violence is allowed but should not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood, but occasional gory moments may be permitted if justified by the context. Sexual violence may only be implied or briefly and discreetly indicated, and must have a strong contextual justification.

The death is non graphic in my film, with no blood, and it is the 'good' character shooting the 'evil' charcter, giving the killing a moral value.

EXHIBITION

POSTER - Modern Products

CAPTURING A MODERN AUDIENCE


I'm guessing you will have noticed that my post on Spaghetti-Western posters was only looking at old products. Although they are very stylised and so can appeal to audiences today for their their uniqueness, it would be good to look at any sort of popular modern cowboy product.

Que Rockstar's 'RED DEAD REDEMPTION':

Red Dead Redemption is the hugely successful, very popular, critically acclaimed, award winning video game. It sold over 2 million units in the combined months of May and June. And it is, genre-wise, a Spaghetti-Western. Just like my film! The poster is then of course a good one to analyse. 

There is a huge chance that the poster designers for Red Dead Redemption looked at the same type of posters that I looked at, as elements are hugely similar. The fonts, the blood red colours, the gun, and the cartoon, non-photographic styled images. If I am clever with my poster, I can make people think about Red Dead Redemption, and it will work the other way around as well.

It will be cool if I ever get a poster this big, though I don't know where I'd put it. As you can see though,  Red Dead had a fairly 'huge' marketing campaign, and the posters were particularly useful as the strong reds/whites/blacks and eye catching depictions were extremely eye catching.

POSTER - Pitch

IDEAS FOR A POSTER



Here are some rough first ideas for film posters, based on my research. I used the strong reds, mixed with the most photographic stills from my film. I also tried out showing guns on the poster. Showing the antagonist and protagonist, the characters the film is about, I also felt was important. The font is changeable, but is similar to recent and old western film posters, and I personally think that it is quite effective.

1+2. I wanted my poster to show the two characters who have the main conflict. I think this one is fairly effective, the silhouette working well with the symmetry of the background image. But I don't think the red works very well with the colours in the background image. So to make this one more effective, I think I would need to adapt the background image, so maybe it was also edited to work with the silhouette: I could maybe change the colours, to make them silhouette like, or make the background more red/black/white.

3. This poster is less effective. Because I felt the red clashed with the other colours, I matched the silhouette with the title. But I think white has now become overused, and is not strong enough. It makes the silhouette less strong and has shows less indication that the film involves a big conflict.

4+5. I like this poster. The two characters having the conflict in the film are face to face, foreshadowing the stand off. The grave gives connotations of death, and is a key prop from the film - it is involved in the reason behind the conflict narratively. The red and black clash together and it is clearly an action-western. It is similar to recent posters for the xbox game 'Red Dead Redemption' and the old cowboy posters of the 60s. To improve this poster however, I think the title 'Spaghetti Western' should be enlarged to have a bigger impact and be more noticeable.

6. The red is now switched with the black - but I think the poster is less effective this way. The red cross gives the wrong connotations to a British audience, and it over all looks less like an action film.

7. Again the white on this poster is inneffective. I like the silhouettes of the gunmen, but the title needs to be bigger, and the poster gives away too much about the narrative of the film.

8+9. In these two I am working with the silhouettes of the gunmen, which I think are very effective. As I found through research, most action themed western posters show guns.  I think the space in the middle needs to be filled, as there is too much open space, but I could always put the grave silhouette in there.

10. I quite like this idea as the title is easily read, and I felt it made me try and work out what the ambiguous shapes in the background where, making me stop and think, and in the end it becomes very clear that it shows two cowboys pointing guns at each other. There are problems too: the yellow makes it look too happy, not representing the film properly, so I would need to change it. Also, I cannot imagine where the essential poster information could go: actors/directors names, rating etc. 

A final comment on my posters: I think the red I have used throughout is the wrong shade. It is too bright and although dangerous looking and vibrant, could almost be viewed as slightly comical. On my next drafts I will make it darker. But don't those silhouettes look great?

POSTER - Cowboy Film Poster Analysis

WHAT DO COWBOY POSTERS LOOK LIKE?


There is a video of this information at the bottom of this post, if you can't be bothered to trawl through the endless text. The posters I refer to can be seen further down also.

So: I need to make a poster. But what do spaghetti-western posters look like? And more specifically, what will 'Spaghetti Western's poster look like? The only way to find out what works and what doesn't, is to look at old spaghetti-western posters.

To start with, I will try and find the similarities between the film posters (of the films that inspired my film), so I have some solid building blocks to start the construction of my poster - I will know what things I will want to include on my poster and what I think is crap.

What is first noticeable about these 4 film posters of Ennio Morricone Western's from the 1960s is that they don't use unedited photographic images. The characters are either painted, or shown through a manipulated photographic image. Although this is obvious, it can be used effectively and non-effectively. For example, on some of these posters, it brings out vibrant colours and creates contrasts - while others become very dull and lifeless. There are many existing programs that I could use to give a photographic image an altered effect, so this is a design technique I could consider using when designing my poster.

All of the posters use reds and browns as the central colours. The browns are a typical colour seen throughout westerns - with the desert settings and the dusty clothes. The vibrant, bright red gives connotations of all sorts of things: Danger, death and blood, the harsh, relentless sun, and heated conflicts. I may want to use a similar colour scheme for my posters - a strong use of vibrant red and earthy brown.

A mood-board or colour palette I made to help in the creation of my poster...using the eyedropper tool on the posters below to steal their colours.

A third similarity is that three of the posters show a cowboy pistol. This is a prop from the film: so having it in the poster gives us an idea of what type of film it is - not just a western, but an action film also. So I will want to consider including a gun on my poster to show the action theme of my film.
Two of the posters here also use a still from the film as the background. I think this is more effective than the other two because it helps give further insight into the film. Audiences can also recognize the still when watching the film.

...ET POUR QUELQUES DOLLARS DE PLUS... For a Few Dollars More. This posters USP (unique selling point) is the main actor, Clint Eastwood, as it is a sequel to a film in which he himself was a huge factor in the films success, for being a silent but deadly, lone, gruff man, an antihero. Here, in this poster, he is depicted the same - he is unshaven and squinting, making him look a wild-west hardened man, and holds his gun up menacingly. You would be forgiven for thinking him the villain of the film, but his menacing pose his contrasted to the still from the film in the background, which shows him as nonchalantly brave in the face of danger - three confident looking Mexicans. This sets him up as an antihero - a gruff but brave lone gunslinger, who is menacing to the viewer, but more so to his enemies.

The font is also effective: it looks just as rugged and 'wild-west' worn as Clint Eastwood himself. So the poster revolves around entirely around Clint Eastwood.

Once Upon a Time in the West. I don't think this poster appeals to me very much, but I want to work out why. I think the paint effect makes the film look old and less exciting, with very dull colours. The characters wear very similar clothes, and nothing is learnt about them through the poster. The film revolves around Charles Bronson, a mysterious man who plays his harmonica sorrowfully, but nothing is seen of the harmonica. His cold hard stare is also deadened by the paint effect. The poster becomes indistinguishable.

This poster I think is also very ineffective. The white and brown dull the poster, while the effect also dulls Clint Eastwood, the USP of the film as indicated by the writing on the left hand side of the screen: 'he's going to trigger a whole new style of adventure'. It is certainly not colourful enough, and could do with the blood-red seen in the poster below.

I think, although the image is not very telling of the film, colour is used to good effect in this poster. The yellow, red and black all contrast effectively to make the characters look dangerous and rough. This is the type of colour scheme I want to use in my poster.