Tags
Art, Consecrated, Film, Independent Film, Movie, Movie Poster, Theatrical
“You need to enlarge that,” my neighbor Bri tells me. I click on the appropriate layer, enlarge the workspace, and adjust the font. “There,” I say as I complete the task. “That looks good,” she approves. At that point the theatrical poster for “Consecrated” was complete. After about five hours of work, the film had a face. It had an image that people could connect with the film. But in five hours, what had I done and what goes into the anatomy of a movie poster?
On a rainy Saturday in early September, Dacia and I went on a photo shoot with Leslie Spencer, a local photographer, to get some images to use in posters, invitations, and other advertisements. The still shots that I had from the film were fine and I plan to release some of those in the coming weeks, but I needed some portrait shots as oppose to landscape shots that consisted of all of our stills. I had some images from Facebook and Twitter that I had come across, which we used as inspiration for our photo-op. Through Leslie’s talent, we were able to recreate these images in a way that suited what we wanted.
After Leslie polished the photos in Photoshop and got me a copy, I worked with Leslie on one of the alternative shots not on the disc so I could have enough space below Dacia to use a billing block (more on that shortly), but enough space above to insert the film’s title. She had just the one and then I was ready to begin.
I attempted to create my own billing block, but what was being created was messy and not like what I saw on posters outside the movie theatre. The billing block is the text with the narrow font at the bottom of the poster, which credits those who contributed to the film. I finally purchased a template and downloaded the appropriate associated fonts. The template offered three options, some for smaller productions, larger productions, and one for a right aligned billing block. I chose the larger productions in order to have the credits available that I wished to credit, but I had to alter it to eliminate credits that were not applicable to my smaller production.
After inserting the proper names and finishing the billing block, it was time to move other text. I selected the font, Parchment, which I had used in the pre-production poster that I had created. I used this font for the rest of the poster. I inserted the title above, while giving Dacia the sought after above-the-title credit. Below the film title, I added “A Tyler Slawson film,” as I want those people who know me to recognize this as my work and not just a random film being promoted. I will forever be the face of Tyler Slawson Pictures, just like Tyler Perry is the face of his studio. That’s just the way it will be. So it is important to consider my credit and where that plays in the poster. I also added the tagline for the film “What if your life wasn’t the fairy tale you always thought it was?” to add intrigue to the story being told on the poster alone. A story is being told and it is supposed to pique interest in the film to where if the person did not watch the trailer and only saw the poster that they would want to see the film.
After I enlarged the font for the title at Bri’s suggestion, it was then the more distinguished focal point of the poster. I saved the Photoshop file as a PDF and sent it to the print shop to be printed in typical movie poster size of 27 X 40. That poster has been used all over social media and the physical poster has been used at screenings. It may require hours of work to get it together, but a poster has great potential to intrigue an audience.