My poster for our film...

Having completed the film our next task was to create a film poster to advertise it. This was a simpler task as I have a lot of experience using photoshop so making the poster wasn't too much hassle. I did a lot of prior research into existing film noir movie posters in order to get a better idea of how I wanted mine to look.

I looked mainly at posters for classic film noir films, from the 40's and 50's, as our film was intended to be a classic noir rather than a neo noir and I wanted my poster to reflect this. The majority of the posters I looked at all featured hand drawn cartoon like pictures of the film's characters rather than still images.

I chose not to go with a design like this as I cannot draw and the hand drawn look would be exceptionally difficult to replicate well using a computer. Also I didn't like how many different things were featured on these posters as it made them look cluttered so I decided to keep mine clean and simple. The final thing I decided to change was to not have any of the film's characters present on my poster as I felt the genre of the film lent itself to mystery and uncertainty so I didn't want anything to be revealed on the poster so that audiences would have to watch the film to find out what it was about. Also unlike these posters I added quotes from reviewers to mine to make the poster look more professional.

I did however choose to keep the old fashioned fonts and dark colours and I wanted to keep my poster quite close the designs of yesteryear as well as to feature some of the conventions of classic noir posters.

My poster for our film noir.

My film poster is more of a teaser, or advance poster, rather than a full theatrical poster. I decided to go with this style as it would allow me to give all the necessary information about the film without giving away too much information such as the plot, theme, and characters which was my intention from the outset. I have included many conventions of existing film posters such as the title of the film, the release date of the film as well as the names of the film's two main actors. The inclusion of reviews at the top from well known sources make our film stand out as being more reputable which is why I chose to include them on my poster. Another convention I followed was to have the name of the production company appear at the top of the poster. This is common on many pre existing modern day film posters that I looked at as part of my research.

I chose to have the title and actors names outlined by an eerie neon glow as it makes it look somewhat like urban street lights at night which is a big convention of film noir films. I chose to have my main picture in  black and white as well in order to go with the genre of the film. I chose a picture of the New York City skyline as the background image for my poster as that is where our film is set so it relates to the film. The picture, which gives a clue as to where the film might be set, is the only part of the poster that really gives anything away so the film is still clouded in mystery much like the characters and events of our film.