Extended Practice: Producing a Promotional Poster

As part of the promotional pack we each needed to create a poster for our animations. I felt like I was fairly comfortable to jump straight into this task as I already had an idea for a poster. The idea was to essentially take heavy inspiration from my title card where it is an aerial shot of Lucy at her classroom desk with doodles plaid out and the title Cops and Daughters written in a handwritten format but instead of using doodles in the poster, take screenshots from the actual animation and place them one on top of the other so not to give away the story but to give the audience a tiny snippet of the narrative.

I do like this poster and have mostly positive things to say about it, although I still felt like I wanted to produce another using a photograph of the Cop in how he appears when Lucy is reading about him in the newspaper.

I was initially inspired by the poster for the film The Social Network. the film came out seven years ago yet the poster has stayed firmly in my mind, and that's because it's very effective. Recently it seems all big budget movies use the idea of slap banging the face of the star of the movie on the poster. However here I feel it's done quite effectively. The text is written over Jesse Eissenberg's face which makes his face blurry and disstaughted to the viewer. 

Usually if we see a poster with a face taking it up we instantly connect to them (see above). Their face is centre frame wikth nothing distracting us. Yet in the poster for The Social Network the face is shrowded in shadows and covered in text. Usually we would instantly connect with this character but because our vision of them is skewed slightly we don't necessarily connect to them as easily which is exactly what I wanted to do with the Cop. Originally I was going to have just one image of the cop central on the poster with text written over, however Eleanor gave me another idea. I'd received positive feedback about a poster I created for a Smashed Vinyl gig. 

The ripping on the poster was a very simple technique that took a matter of minutes yet proved to be very effective. I was encouraged to use this same technique for this poster and instead of having loads of the Smashed vinyl heads, replace them with the portrait of the cop over and over again. This still accomplishes my goal of disstaughting our perception of the cop but now it looks more like Lucy has ripped up the image of her dad herself enforcing the idea that the narrative is about some sort of broken relationship.

I  received positive feedback about this new poster from Steve who said that the idea of ripped photography and ripped film is an image that is very powerful and impacting. It's a technique that's been used many times in the past but it's popular because it has proven to be effective at evoking that sense of a fractured hero.

I have to say that even though this poster took significantly less time to produce than my first, I feel it is more effective and communicates the tone of my animation better. However, I was encouraged that I should create a coloured version. Even though the subject matter of my animation is at times dark, it is always presented visually with very bright colours and here it's almost like I am promoting a film that itself is black and white.

So I created a second version of the poster and I feel adding colour has made all the difference. It still communicates the tone of being a fractured story yet it still looks like my animation. Steve did feedback to me that it might look more successful if the poster contained doodles scribbled over the portraits and loose pens, pencils and rubbers from my first poster splayed over so it more looks like it was Lucy that did the ripping. This is definitely something for me to consider.