Film Posters: A Contextual Series

The Guardian has a whole series on film posters, looking at some of the best and worst in recent times.  Some of the articles include interviews with creatives behind the films that are being promoted.  Well worth a look before embarking on your product research.  You can find it here

Film Posters: The Inside View

A great interview with the creators of the Trainspotting poster campaign can be found here.   It is still one of the most iconic campaigns and has often been copied.  You can learn a lot by reading about the creative process behind the campaign

Narrative: An Instructional Video

For anyone who needs a quick, whizz bang reminder about narrative and all it entails.

Poster Design Ideas

In preparation for designing your film poster for your Advanced Portfolio, you'll probably busy yourself examining the latest Hollywood offerings.  However, to help stimulate your creativity and imagine a less conventional approach to poster design, you could spend a little time looking at the following post at Brain Pickings. Lots of great minimalist posters for children's fairy tales. Looking at them should help you think about what is the essence of your narrative and how could your represent it visually.  In fact, if you want to stimulate your creativity, just browse through Brain Pickings as it has all sorts of wonderful visual things.

Advertising, Parody and Mainstream Audiences - a tricky triangle.

This may be of interest to those of you who attended the Media Magazine Conference this year.  Director Garth Jenning's ad for Phones4U earned over 500 complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency. However, they weren't upheld, meaning that the ad can continue to be shown.  It goes to show how parody and irony are tricky approaches as not all the audience necessarily "get it" and can end up being offended or, in this case, scared.

All American Muslim - Advertisers and Representation

The American TV market is much more aggressively commercial than in Britain but this story illustrates how advertisers can potentially exert pressure on broadcasters to represent different communities in a particular way.  It also shows the power of the web and social media in both the creation of reaction to this storm.  Read the attached BBC article (link embedded in title of post) and google "All American Muslim" for more.  There's a lot more to this story than I can write here. Explore for yourself.

Product Research - Film Posters

Click on the title above for a great starting point for film poster analysis.