The document discusses typical conventions for movie posters, including that they normally contain an image with text, often featuring photographs of main actors. The text usually includes the film title in large lettering and names of main actors. It may also include the director, characters, release date. Posters are found in and outside cinemas, billboards, bus stops, websites, DVD packaging and advertisements. The document then analyzes recent Hollywood blockbuster posters from 2012 and notes they all feature close-ups of famous actors' faces with a hint to the story, allowing audience identification through recognized stars. This technique may not work for British films using unknown actors, who would need different strategies to draw audiences, such as using bright primary colors

2. Typical conventions

 A movie poster is a poster used to advertise
a film.
 They normally contain an image with text.
 Today's posters often feature photographs of the
main actors.
 The text on movie posters usually contains the
film title in large lettering and often the names
of the main actors.
 It may also include a tag line, the name of the
director, names of characters, the release date,
etc.

3. Basics
 Where are they?
 In/outside cinemas
 Billboards.

 Bus Stops
 Websites, DVD, packaging, flyers, advertisements in
magazines.

4. 

5. As we can see the Hollywood blockbuster movie posters of 2012 all appear to have the
same basic layout – close up of the face with an item (such as an apple) that hints
towards the story of the film. However these close ups could be a clever publicity
technique, as all the close ups are of characters played by famous actors/actresses. We
can apply this to Blumler and Katz’s explanation of IDENTIFICATION – audiences will

recognise a film based on the famous actors displayed, and this will be an immediate
reason as to why they will see a film. This would not work on our poster as British
realism films tend to use unknown actors.
With this in mind we would need to think of different
ways to draw in an audience to our film. If
we look at the posters for Submarine
(2010) and the more recent Salmon
Fishing in the Yemen (2012) we can see
the theme of using bright, primary
colours in the titles for the film. These
colours draw attention to a poster,
making it recognisable, easily standing
out. Especially with SFINY we can see
the need for a poster to stand
(Hollywood blockbusters) are. The photo
creates an emotional atmosphere which
will also draw in an audience.