Final Film Poster

Production process of our Final Poster

Film Poster - First Draft

Here are a few step-by-step images of how we produced our film poster using Photopshop CS5:

This is the image of our main character (Al Ciento)

This is a background layout for our film poster, which is opened up on a separate tab.

We then intricately cropped the image to the required field of the character. 

We then used the quick selection to extract the main composition of our main character.

As you can see we had to be very careful around the hair especially as it had a lot of curves.

We then realized that the outcome of this wasn't great as the editing of using the quick selection tool looked pretty unprofessional and therefore we came up with a different method.

Here is a video of the production process in creating our film poster:

Poster - Initial Ideas

Final Magazine Cover

Here is our finished magazine cover: =)

Feedback - Solving the problems

After looking at our feedback we then set out to fix the magazine cover. We started with the merging the faces properly and found a good tutorial to help us with this:

We then addressed the idea of adding a special effect to the merged image and watched tutorials which showed us how to do this:

With the feedback on the logo, we would just try to crop it better so that the logo would not have some of the logo cut off. 

Influences on film posters

We have started doing some research into many crime and action film posters and found that most film posters had similar elements in terms of costumes and props used. From this, we were significantly intrigued by the layout of the posters as the main character(s) are outlined very superior and/or important on the basis of the scale of the image shown. We analysed specific film posters (most of which are our trailer influences), and have reproduced the film posters to our own film poster to help analyse key concepts and potentials of each poster. We then evaluated reasons why these film posters have influenced us in any form of aspects such as text, layout, colours used, costume, props, effects and scaling. Finally, we then decided which film poster is our most favourite and explain why we decided to choose it.

1)

 

The poster of 'The Godfather II' has a black background layout. Only Robert De Niro (main character) fades into the black background where there is a bright yellow tone around Rover De Niro's image. The use of a bright yellow tone produces a warming effect and accentuates Robert De Niro's power and importance involved in the film. This idea of bright colours clashing against a dark dull black background can be used to highlight the significance of characters involved in our film which would effectively ensure the audience is aware of such indication. 

On the bottom right corner, there is a negative effect of other characters involved in the film which can represent a feeling of mystery as well as goodness. The shade of black can be considered as a negative connotation such as death and violence, but at the same time, elegance and authority. The shade of white/grey can be associated with coolness and innocence of the characters, which can therefore result in mixed indications and/or thoughts among the audience as to whether these characters are either 'villains' or 'heroic' characters. This suggests that the film will stimulate a very imaginative response from the audience. 

The concept of having characters in the bottom right can be useful for our film poster as it can help the audience establish the relevance of our film title 'Only The Family'. The large scaling of Robert De Niro (our main character in our case) compared to the other images and text can also help the audience determine the concept of  control our main character has over his group membership, which is referred as 'his men' (family). 

The costume of suit outfits was a major aspect of emphasizing the genre and theme of the film in which we believe to follow. 

The text used in this film poser was not necessarily inviting, as we thought that the cross symbol and hand had obviously some relation to The Godfather film but would strongly have no purpose to use it for our own film poster.

2)

From the film poster of 'Mean Streets', we liked the concept of the streets inside the gun as it clearly relates to the title of the film. Yet again, we found that the film poster had a black background, which near enough has the same purpose of the Godfather's film poster of negative connotation of death and violence. The word 'mean' from the title is clearly represented by the use of a gun and the word 'streets' are illustrated within the area of the gun as it could imply that this certain location is highly involved in the storyline of the film and adds the impression that all the dirt (killing) appears to happen in the location shown. This illustration was extremely convincing and we thought we could apply this idea to our own film poster as shown in our sketch of the film poster. We thought we could use this idea by adding the main character on the top of the gun to emphasise his domineering position in the hierarchy of his group membership. We also added the members of the group memberships at the bottom of the gun who are also crime syndicates. The whole effectiveness of this is to mainly indicate their power in the group membership and that they're controlled by the main character who is near the top of the gun. This would also be relevant towards our film poster as it can relate to our film title of 'Only the Family'.

The colour red is the colour of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, danger, power, strength and desire. The use of red can also hint the genre and film of the film poster which can stereotypically be either a horror/thriller/crime/action film. This also makes text and images to the foreground which increases audience awareness.

With text, we liked the style and layout of the font used as it seems to be bold and strong in which we are aiming for our own film poster. However, we thought that the credits used was pretty limited and narrow where we decided that this aspect of the film poster would not be replicated in our own film poster.

Overall, we thought that this film poster isn't particularly ideal for our own film poster as it we would want to reveal our main characters and imply more of their class and status through the use of costume. The idea of having a map of streets in a gun was actually a clever illustration considering the title was mean street and it can relate to each other very strongly, but it would be extremely difficult for us to reproduce this in the form of 'Only the Family' in a gun due to the complexity of interpretations. The word 'only' would be very difficult for us to illustrate in our film poster.

We also believed that the film poster was generally simplistic and concise which does not meet our preference.


3)

With 'Goodfellas', we thought that this film had a interesting layout as it also uses a black background where we have a shot of the main characters standing beside each other. The characters costume is the same where their black suit camouflages with the background meaning the white shirt is more definable. We like the use of costume of characters as it allows the audience to establish their role in the film as well as the genre of the film.  We liked the layout of the credits on the bottom which is something that we are more looking for as we believe it looks more professional. 

As Reservoir Dogs was a key influence for our film trailer we decided to do elaborative research on their film posters. We looked at a range of their films posters and analysed them:

4)

We thought that this version wasn't distinctive as it appeared to look more like a magazine cover. The layout and template of the text seemed more of a magazine cover. However, we thought that blood effect was pretty impressive despite that it would look more realistic with a darker shade of red. We also didn't like the idea of having the character holding the gun in that specific angle and the characters facial expression as it didn't appear to look serious and we wanted our poster to seem prestige and look elegant.

5)

We really liked this style of the reservoir dog poster in terms of the style and layout of the text. We liked the use of font as this seems to have the characteristic's of class and elegance. It looks professional and the use of both colours (white and red) accentuates the genre of the film, as mentioned earlier, the theme of red is associated with blood and violence. Also the costume of a black and white suit and sunglasses is a classical outfit for classy men and a hitman. This would therefore be easier for the audience to establish that this would involve crime and effectively notice the genre of the film. We also like the fact how the text size vary with a few words.

A problem with this film poster is that we didn't really like the concept of the warhol effect used. This is because we thought it took away the realism and removes the serious expressions of the main character. We want express our main character as humorless and an important man and therefore this expression can be flawed by not showing the main characters features (just like The Godfather 2 poster). 

6)

We liked the whole of idea of the division of all four main characters where they all wear the same costumes which demonstrates their status and coolness. This idea of all wearing sunglasses and black and white suit can be applied to our film poster as it can easily relate to our film title of 'Only The Family'. We also liked the font style used in this poster as it looks bold and strong. The four characters applied onto the title also looked prominent, in which we thought will look great in our film poster. 

On a general perspective, we thought that the film poster seemed a bit plain and lacked some essentials of a film poster. It also had a weird touch as it used bright colours such as yellow, pink and orange which somehow does make it standout but doesn't suit the film poster in any way in terms of genre. 

7)

We thought that this film poster was eye-catching to some extent. We thought that it was a bit more different to all the others as it uses a long shot of the four main characters. This therefore reveals the characters costume to a much bigger scale in which allows the characters to express their body gesture. In doing so, this therefore allows the characters to represent themselves as gangsters and walk in a cool manner in which would be suitable for the audience to identify the idea behind the film. 

The blood splatter in the background was personally poor as we thought it wasn't as good as film poster 4. Also the font style for the phrase on the bottom and title wasn't as good as film poster 5 as it appears to look more suitable for comedy or romantic films.  

Changes Made to Magazine Cover

After receiving feedback for the magazine cover we needed to make changes so that it looked perfect and like an actual Little White Lies cover. Below is a video of the changes that we made:

We started by re-merging the two images first, to make sure all facial aspects were in line and matched. We did this by cropping out half of Umed's face and placing t over the picture of Naiem's face. We then decreased the opacity of the picture of Umed so that we could re-size the image perfectly with Naiems face. To the best of our ability we lined up the jaw, lips, nose and hairline. We then selected a part of Umed face to use the clear brush tool so that we could get in half of Naiems face in the picture also.  After doing this we increased the opacity back up to 100% and then did a final re-size to make sure the images were lined up together properly. This was our image: 

We went with the two faces idea as we had two protagonists in our film and to show the equal divide (through half and half of each persons face) between the two. 

We went onto address the fact our merged picture would look better with an effect on it. So we went into the filter gallery and chose and picked one from the 'Brush Strokes' section called 'Accented Edges'. 

We added in this effect as we thought it would suite our picture and the theme Little White Lies follows. Every cover Little White Lies has done as some sort of artistic effect on the cover picture and we believed this best represented ours.  

We moved onto the fact our logo didn't look good as some of the circle from the logo was cut off. We got up the Serpico Little White Lies cover and cropped the logo down and copy and pasted it onto our magazine cover. We zoomed into the image and used the quick select the parts of the image of the Serpico image that we could not crop. We used the clear brush tool to erase these and so that our main image would come through.

We then added in our text with a better font and size and placed it onto our magazine cover. 

Feedback for Magazine Cover

After creating the magazine cover we showed some of the people who picked our 'Little White Lies' idea and asked them what they thought. We found that they though the idea was good however they didn't think the way the two faces were merged 'looked right'; as some parts were out of proportion and looked wrong. Also they pointed out that the actual Little White Lies logo was not added properly as a little bit was missing from the bottom of the circle. They also suggested that it would be good if we added an effect on the picture of the two merged faces.

Magazine Cover Production

After doing a the relevant research we begun creating our magazine cover. We went with the idea that we we would have two faces merged into one, for our Little White Lies cover. Below is a video of how we created the magazine cover:

We begun the magazine cover by opening up our images of our characters and our main influence (the Serpico issue) we then also opened a new file and put in the dimensions in inches of 8.5 x 11 and changed the backgroud to black.

After doing this we cropped the Little White Lies logo from the Serpico issue of Little White Lies and then used the rectangular marquee tool to select the surface area of the logo we wanted to copy and paste onto our magazine cover.  After doing this we used the transform controls to re-size the image to an appropriate size and cut out all the excess that we could not crop out from the Serpico issue.  We did this by zooming into the image and using the quick selection tool to select the part we did not want and then used the brush tool, selected the colour of our background and brushed over it. So that we could accurately brush out the parts we did not want without damaging the image we used the sub tools of 'Add to selection' and 'Subract to selection' so that we could perfectly select the parts we wanted to rub out. 

We then started to merge the images together. We did this by cropping a part of Umed's face and then using the rectangular marque tool to selct the area we wanted to copy and past on top of the other image. After copying and pasting it onto the other image we re-sized the image to get them in line.

After re-sizing these images we then used the rectangular marquee tool to select the area we wanted and copied and pasted it into our magazine cover file; and began removing excess from the background we did not want from the image.

Before finishing we added the title of our film. 

Here is our finished magazine cover:

Little White Lies

After showing members of the public our trailer and then showing them the different magazine cover ideas we found that the favoured idea was Little White Lies.  We found that they liked the idea of the two faces merged as one and that it didn't give away too much about the film.

We then begun research into the Little White Lies magazine covers to find out exactly what we would need to be doing. We started by looking at films which were similar to ours in terms of genre and target audience which Little White Lies created covers for. This is what we found:

We found that films such as: Lawless, Django Unchained, Serpico and Drive had allbeen on the cover of Little White Lies.

 

 

 

As you can see from the IMDb profile, Lawless is a Crime/Drama film like ours which is a Crime film.

 

 

Django Unchained has similar themes as our film such as violence and action.

 

Like Lawless, Drive shares a genre with our film by being in the Crime/Drama genre.

 

Serpico is a crime film like 'Only The Family'.  

 

 

 

 

Choosing a Final Magazine Cover

After creating all the drafts we needed to pick a final magazine cover which would be our main one. However we could find good and bad things about each cover. What we did was we Chose three drafts which we would present to different people and get their feedback which idea they prefer and whether or not they would purchase it.

The four drafts we picked were: Little White Lies, Empire, Total Film and Inside the Actors Studio

Here is what we found:

Inside The Actors Studio - Draft

After deciding on 'Inside The Actors Studio' we decided to create a draft for it to get an idea of what would be going in the magazine cover. Here is what we came up with.

As you can see it is very simplistic and would feature a picture of the main actor of the film looking relaxed (we wanted to make sure in the picture our actor looked relaxed as we believed it was a more relaxed magazine). It would also feature the title of the magazine and in smaller writing would list some of the other interviews and articles in the magazine whilst also mentioning who the main interviewee was.

Inside the Actors Studio - Magazine Cover Idea

We Also decided on a new idea which was to create our own film magazine. We decided on the idea of using an existing established product and presenting it in a different format. We had two choices we were going to go for which were either an IMDB magazine or An 'Inside The Actors Studio' magazine.

With IMDB we thought we would have a magazine which was similar to Empire and Total Film. We thought we create a magazine which has one main image and headline while also accommodating other articles, headlines and pictures from the film world.

We also looked at the television show 'Inside the Actors Studio' and decided to create a magazine off of this idea. This magazine would feature interviews with actors on upcoming films and would follow the basis of the tv show and take questions from the public. In terms of the front cover it would be very simplistic having an image of an actor (main character of a film), with a smaller title which would be the film name and also other interviews in the magazine. 

After looking at both in great detail we decided to go for the 'Inside the Actors Studio' idea as it was something we could see being turned into an actual magazine whereas IMDb could only really be a product based solely for the internet. We thought this because IMDb do not really promote films, instead they give general information about the films while we thought as a magazine cover was part of a promotion for a film we could use 'Inside the Actors Studio' where actors would promote the film and their interview would be based on the film.

Magazine Cover Drafts

After looking at different magazine covers we decided to create a few rough drafts of what our magazine cover would look like before creating it. We took three different film magazines (Empire, Little White Lies, Total film) and created a third (Inside the Actors Studio) which was based on an existing idea but presented in a different format. Here are our drafts:

This is our first draft. This would be our magazine cover if we were to pick Little White Lies. As little white lies features one main character on the front of their covers and we have two main characters we decided that we would split the cover between our two main characters. We would do this by cropping one half of Al Ciento's face and cropping the other half of Carmen Riqueza's face and putting them together. We would have to ensure they are symetrically lined up. This magazine cover would aslo feature the magazine logo and the title of the film.

This is the second draft. This is the Total Film magazine cover. It would contain alot more than the Little White Lies cover. It would feature either one of our main characters in costume and holding a gun. The title would also be more obvious and bigger than the one in Little White Lies. It would also have additional informatiuon and headlines about different promotions, movie events and upcoming films. in this magazine cover we would also add all the names of thos involved in creating the trailer. This part would predominantly feature the actors involved in the trailer.

This is the draft for Empire magazine. This would follow the typically format of the Empire magazine with it featuring a massive title of both the film and the magazine name. Also include extra articles and headlines. However in this one instaed of featuring one or both of our main characters doing a pose instead we would feature a scene from the film. In this case we picked the scene from the trailer where Carmen Riqueza is strangling oneof Al Cientos men in the car with a wire. We would not just grab this image from the trailer but we would go back and recreate the scene. Instead of filming it we would simply take pictures of the scene and put it on as the magazine cover.

We created a second draft for Total Film which would see both main characters on the front cover looking at each other. We did this to show that they are 'squaring up' to each other just before their fight. We did not follow Total Films formula of having big headlines and lots of detail in this draft. We preferred the simplistic look for this one.