Creating the Poster
Firstly, we decided to choose an image from the film that included a picture of the protagonist and the lift as both are important features of the film that we thought may add to giving the audience a bit more information as to what the film includes. Additionally we thought the fact you cannot see the characters face increased the mystery of the poster and hence may lead audiences to want to watch more to see who this character is and what are his motives. We also decided to stick with the black and white theme at this point in the editing of the poster as originally we believed this made the film more identifiable as a horror as the low key lighting and dark composition of the shot is a convention used often in many of the film posters we researched.
We then experimented with adding more important credits on the poster such as the actors names. Orginally we thought it may look effective to layer these credits above the title as you can see from the image on the left. However, we then decided we did not like the look of this as it took too much attention away from the title and looked too 'cluttered' (we found the most effective posters were the more simplistic ones) and so we thought the names of the cast looked more professional at the top of the poste (as you can see on the right) as this is were these credits are often placed on real film posters.
Although originally we only wanted the number plate on the lift to be the only element of colour in the poster, to make it stand out. However, we thought the title of the film appeared also to look very effective in red as we wanted it to symbolise themes of blood-spill and murder and hence these connotations would allow the audience to undestand and recognise that the film is of the horror genre more so than if the text were black. Additionally, we decided to add more important features included in professional posters such as the release date which heightens the anticpation of the film and also included 'From the directors of Fixation' (our previous short film) as an advertising strategy as audiences often want to watch films more if they have enjoyed other films by that director.
Finally, we decided that we were not happy with the original colour theme as we thought it made the poster look rather dull and 'washed out'. Therefore to make our poster stand out more on the market to audiences we decided to use the pictures original colours whilst adding a slight green grainy filter over the top to portray the appearence of a CCTV camera, which we thought was also effective in portraying one of the main elements in our short film.