For our media studies project, Gurpreet and I have decided to design and produce a series of advertising posters for a new horror movie

The understanding of audience and genre for this project will be important to its success. Things like iconography, stereotypes and generic conventions will be very important. When a film is being marketed to an audience the main aspect will be its genre, therefore the poster must attract audiences which will lead to the films’ success. It is crucial that when we create a poster, that it must be instantly recognisable as a film from the horror genre. There are so many stereotypical settings for the horror genre films, for example graveyards, churches and dark surroundings etc. Characters in horror genre films also support Propp’s theory of a hero, dispatcher, helper, villain and princess. Considering conventions, each genre has its own individual features and reappearing ideas. These conventions make the genre what it is. With our project we will look at conventions very closely to make sure our film is accepted as a horror film. For iconography, the icons used will be instantly recognisable to the horror genre, for example knifes, blood and screams. Finally, when designing the posters it would be useful to think about the power of connotation levels in the colour, shapes and language. We will carefully select the right choice of colours and shapes to denote the horror genre.

To help us in conventions used in the horror genre, Gurpreet has done some research into previous film posters. This will be useful to us as we can see how the posters are made and we can also gather an understanding of what to include in our own posters. Firstly we looked at the teaser poster for the film ‘End of Days’. In an interesting way the poster lacks detail, however it seems to sell itself very well. The quote at the bottom reads “when the thousand years are expired”. This provides the audience with an enigma, so they can come up with their own expectations of the film. In the second poster for ‘End of Days’ there is much more detail. We can see a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger looking away from the camera not making eye contact. His unshaven look connotes roughness and tells us that he is tough and maybe he is going to be the hero in the film. In both posters the deep red and black colours clearly bring in connotations of fire, blood, evil and darkness which you expect to find in any good horror film.

To make our posters in an effective way I have used a vast amount of technology. Since I enjoy IT, graphics and art I think I done a good job in creating some professional and realistic looking posters. Software that I chose to use for the poster design was Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro 8. These types of software were used to manipulate and arrange images taken from my digital camera and scanned pictures from my scanner. Microsoft Internet Explorer was also a helpful resource for Gurpreet when he had to look for previous posters on the film ‘End of Days’. We both thought it would be best to get the posters printed of at a qualified printing shop to achieve a professional finish to our posters.