Poster Critical Self Reflection

 Film Poster - Horror

As I was researching horror movie posters, I saw only 2-3 colors. Red, Black and White. I felt that this took away the identity of each of the movie posters, and people are so used to the cliché color scheme representing blood through the color red. I decided to break this typical convention by using ‘a different shade of red’, which became the tagline for my poster. The color scheme for my poster now became pink-themed, with a sense of mystery and a lurking horror through visual effects.

I’ve heard different kinds of people talk about horror movies, from enjoying the thrill of it to avoiding it due to being unable to sleep afterwards. I’ve concluded that my typical audience would enjoy horror movies, and are looking for different kinds of movies to explore their tastes and find something that would scare them. However, due to me challenging the cliché color scheme of a horror movie, it may attract other people who more lightly watch horror movies and people who reluctantly watch them too.

In my case, I’m rather challenging the stereotype of pink being a bright and happy color while red is usually used to represent horrific events, etc. The pink in this poster is not as noticeable as most focus colors are in movies, especially in horror movies. It is rather subtle and hidden yet stands out once understood. It projects the idea of the story rather well, as pink would not be something that most people would expect from a horror movie, and would be a surprise to the viewers, which is why there is a small waving figure in the window to signify a hidden obstacle that most wouldn't notice, including the characters.

My audience would typically be young adults who enjoy horror movies and are searching for something different. I’m not exactly challenging the convention but rather I feel I’m creating a branch of the audience. My product is able to target my audience due to the poster still clearly being a horror poster, thus attracting the niche of horror enjoyers

My Poster would be shown on billboards, in social media posts and on websites, as it has the landscape format which would fit on a lot of videos, landscape posts, billboards, etc.

At the beginning of this project i had not expected to edit the post using photoshop, rather i had planets to draw it. Quite obviously from the difference of my drawing skills in the first draft and the edit on the final product I had made the right choice to develop it using editing in photoshop. There were a few ideas i had at the start, such as a few more characters on the silhouette, but i decided that would be too crowded, and i put some of their heads on the head mounts in front of the house, with one head mount empty but implying that one of the remaining survivors will have their head placed on it. My Initial idea was also to keep colors in the poster, but that would have made too much color on it and remove the idea of a horror movie from viewers, thus i had tweaked it to make it mostly monochrome aside from the star appeal, the pink figure which can be seen in the background as well as in the window.

At first, I had made a rough idea of what I wanted to make on paper, and then switched to Adobe Photoshop and drew using my touchpad for the first draft. It was challenging to get the image in my head that I wanted to project onto the draft, but I got the idea in there. After getting my idea into the draft using photoshop, I decided to make an edit instead of drawing, also using photoshop. However I was not entirely familiar with photoshop so I had to use different programs to do things that I couldn't do in photoshop. Removing the background from an image, for example. I had originally just used the tool in MS Word, but that can be rather inaccurate, so I asked for help from my friend Jason who suggested the paint.net app in which i could select an item in an image more specifically. This development had really helped me with images that blended rather well with the background such as the pink figure in the background as well as the silhouettes of the characters on the bottom. Honestly, if i had not asked Jason and started using the pain.net app, I would be set back quite a lot, having to find different pictures that fit my poster less well, or I would have spent so much time fighting the background remover in MS Word. Other than my production stages, for references I simply used google image search and for my concept I had just taken them out of my mind.