Evaluation - Question 1

This is my evaluation response to question one. We equally split the responsibility of talking about one specific subject area. In my video I focused on talking about the poster. I wanted to explain how we stuck to conventions of existing posters when creating our film poster. We researched existing posters on websites such as www.empireonline.com, www.lovefilm.com and www.imdb.com to look at the conventions. We followed conventions such as using a bold title and positioning the title at the top and middle of the poster. We also noticed that the text for horror film trailers were quite dark and gave an instantly edgy look. We wanted to keep to the conventions here as we not only think it looks professional but fits in with the genre. Ways in which we challenged the genre would be when our poster image is not as dark as existing ones we have looked at. Existing posters that we looked at seemed to use quite dark lighting and contrast. Our final poster image was taken in daylight however we did decrease the brightness and contrast in order to stick to conventions of popular posters however we used a diffuse glow effect on Photoshop in order to give quite a 'spirtual' look to make it clear to the audience that the character is somehow a spirit. This could be seen as challenging conventions because not many horror trailer posters use bright lighting, they normally stick to being dark.

We however still stuck to the conventions with the posters by adding star ratings from a local paper. We chose to add the star rating from 'The Times' as it is a reliable and trustworthy source. We also decided to use a tag line which is a convention we have seen in not every movie poster but in a variety of them. We decided on 'Love just got scary' because we felt this conveyed the message of our film in a short and snappy form.

We felt as if the the audience would expect the poster to look dark and bold and instantly be drawn to the title and main image. We wanted to use an obviously 'scary' and shocking image in order to make the audience look twice and be interested in watching the film. We chose the image of the hand creeping across the tree because it is quite unusual and we felt as if this would entice the audience and make them interested in the mystery surrounding the image. We felt this developed the conventions of existing posters because it followed what the audience was expect from a horror film which is a mysterious image with piercing text.

We challenged usual conventions of posters as with the text because on the tag line we used a 'colloquial' and 'friendly' font. This is unusual for horror posters because the fonts usually stick to being quite formal and have an 'edge'. We decided to use a 'friendly' font and challenge conventions with the words 'love just got' because we wanted to make the audience aware of the concept of the film. We feel as if the merging of the two binary opposites - love and death work well in this situation. We feel as if this risk paid of and we think it still looks like a horror poster although not all the fonts are instantly 'creepy'.

All blog entries are on the group blog which includes every group member talking about all three final designs ; http://a2media10.blogspot.com/