A brief overview of the process that I underwent to create the Short Film poster for 'Love Notes'

1. Ancillary Task [Poster]

2. Research I have looked at Short Film posters, also Independent Film posters, to get inspiration and to gain a greater understanding of generic conventions.

3. I liked the simplicity of the text layout in these posters, it is very neat and ordered which I think works well. I realised from looking at these posters that the title should be the largest font, the text at the bottom (credits) should be the smallest, and order should be kept, the more important information should be larger, I used this brief when designing my own poster.

4. I like the 'Idle Hands' posters for the artistic look that is has, also I feel that it creates a sense of mystery surrounding the film as the audience are not shown any of the actors. I also like the more conventional style that is shown in the poster for 'A Single Man', the simplicity of the text and the photograph work well together in my opinion.

5. Choosing a Font

6. I looked at different fonts using dafont.com to decide what I liked best, I knew I wanted something quite feminine and simple to complement the simplistic style I aimed for, but I also wanted it to be interesting and eye catching as well, as it serves the purpose of attracting attention. I chose the flowery font ‘Fleur de Liane’ (the fifth font) as I found it most attractive, and also because it sounds like my name.

7. Choosing a Photo

8. Sample photographs

9. When filming the opening and closing scene we took photographs to use for the advertising. I think the light capturing is very beautiful and chose to use this photo as I thought it was the best for the purpose.

10. Firstly I edited the photograph using brightness, contrast and saturation to enhance the over all visual quality. As the photograph was not A4 I mirrored the image to create a full background for the poster, by doing this it took away any risk of the image stretching. After choosing my typeface from all the ones I had researched, I played around with scaling and size. After looking and researching a lot of film posters, it appeared that the title of the film was usually at the bottom this make much more sense as we read posters from top to bottom, so by placing the title as the last big thing we see it will become more successful as an information poster.

11. As I took the realistic approach, the majority of independent posters have nominations/awards from film festivals that discover new talent, with this being a short film I added some of these logos to the poster to give it more aesthetic value and making my thought and design process more clear. Also with posters it has credits, so by paying close detail to my researched posters and seeing what they have written on there I was able to create this adding a more realistic overall visual.

12. To finalize the poster I added some elements that give away the story line a little to draw the audience in. The tagline being 'A Modern Fairy Tale' and then adding the words coming from the book 'Once Upon a Time' I think this ties the poster together overall, I used the line tool and added each word as a separate layer to achieve this look. I am happy with the final poster, I think it looks romantic, which fits well with the film. I also that the poster looks slightly aged and that the characters face is not fully recognisable from the film which helps create an enigma.