Film posters

Poster creation from Ellis Smith

Radio trailer research

In order to create an effective radio trailer I must first understand what they are and what makes them effective. The first thing I did was simply search "Radio trailers" in the Google search engine and navigated through the different links. Below is some of the information I found.

Conventions of a typical radio trailer:

• Voice over, with hints of sounds and speech from the film.
• Information at the end of the trailer with details about viewing and certificate.
• The slogan to the film.
• Sound affects and music from the film where appropriate.

A major aspect of the trailer is where and when it will be played. For example a radio trailer that is going to be on Radio One at tea time is likely to be very different to an advert used on a local radio after the watershed. Also different types of films will be on different stations at different times. I feel that our film would likely be played on a local radio station as it is a low budget film and would be more suited to a later time, not because it will have in appropriate for children content but because there is likely to be more of our target audience listening to the radio at this time.

Voice overs- As the voice over plays a massive part of the radio trailer it is important that they say the correct things and don't sound silly. In order to do this I will need to listen to some already existing voice overs on trailers for other similar and successful films.

Trailers often begin and end with the voice over. They often seem to begin the trailer introducing the film and giving the basis of what to expect. Then throughout the middle of the trailer it uses sounds and speech from the film too "hint" at areas the public might like. Finally it then ends with the voice over explaining when and where they can see the film. One good example of this is the Ted trailer however instead of using the voice over again at the end to explain about when and where they can see the film it has used text.

Film poster research

In order to create an effective film poster the first thing that I needed to do was research film posters. The first thing I did was simply search 'film poster' on a search engine.  

Many really successful films appeared and the first thing I did was analyse and compare them. The first thing I noticed is that nearly all of the posters have the main character or characters in the middle of the poster and the title was towards the bottom of the posters. Also the posters tend to use bloc colours such as black, white, blue and red. These colours contrast and will often help make different aspects of the poster stand out. 

  

Next I went on Youtube and searched 'how to make an effective film poster in photoshop'. my idea was not to copy or follow any of these tutorials but to watch them and learn skills that could be used effectively on our film poster. Below is one of the videos I watched.

Finally I searched "how to make an effective movie poster" and found a website that gave me some knowledge on what is good to use in a film poster and what shouldn't be used when designing a film poster. For example I learnt that an effective film poster shouldn't use too many colours and should all ways have a standout title. Link to website



Film advertisement

In order to get people to watch our film, we must advertise it to the target audience. There are many different methods of advertisement that can be used to advertise our film however we must choose the most appropriate one's otherwise they may not be as effective.

One method of advertisement that we will use will be film posters. A film poster is a paper based piece of advertisement that is used to promote and advertise a film. We have decided to use film posters because they are logical and cost effective way of communicating to a large audience. When placed correctly attractive posters can lure local or passing people to the film. The major benefit for our film will be that it is a very cheap effective method of advertisement when compared to thing such as TV advertisement. We will simply need to pay for printing and will only need to print the necessary amount of posters.

Another method of advertisement that we will use is a radio trailer. A radio trailer is sound from a film that is narrated by a voice over in order to give the target audience a tease of the film. These trailers are then played on local or national radio stations between shows, similar to a TV advert. The major difference between the two is that there is no still/moving images used and radio trailers are much cheaper to advertise than TV adverts. By using a narrator enables the audience to listen to information about our film including storyline and screening locations. As well as being more cost effective, radio advertisement is also more time effective when compared with things such as paper based advertisements. It takes much longer to print off and distribute paper based advertisement.