Graphical themes

During the early stages of our projects production, I had set my mind of creating an appropriate aesthetic for our film. I wanted to ensure that the images I would be making during the project's creation would be visually interesting, so I began work on finding a suitable pallet of colours which would be appropriate for a poster of the short.
I approached this by finding a small selection of posters for thrillers which had similar themes to our short film, sampling the colours, and painting dots of each colour in a blank Photoshop document. I wanted to see which colours mixed well together, so I ran a few effects, a mosaic pixilization effect to take the mean colour from a group of dots, and a radial blur to mix things together. This resulted in a rather nice pattern of curved, staggered lines which work well in an overlay form atop the poster I've been working on.



This asset has come in useful in the creation of the poster, where it is being used as an overlay atop the main image, adding the round, fragmented texture to the image. This is especially handy because it allows us to convey the fragmented stylalization of the narrative as well as the importance of the broken mirror/reflective objects in our film in a fairly subtle manner.

Poster Development

In the past few lessons Jon and I have started making progress on a possible poster for our film. I used a few graphical elements which I created a while ago by creating a pallate of colours sampled from generic thriller posters and applied a bunch of photoshop effects to it. I was quite happy with the result, as the fractured overlay effect ties in nicely with the themes of reflection and the broken mirror prop which plays a fairly important role in the narritave of the short film.

I combined this with a still taken from an early cut of a scene provided by Ed. Since this still is fairly low resolution, we are planning to take a proper photograph another time to allow the poster to me larger and escape the need of hiding artifacting with excessive effects.

In our final poster, we've planned to include mid-closeup shots of the key characters in the current negative space along side each section of text, and hopefully this opposite positioning of these images on the poster will allow people to guess their relationship to each other right out of the box.


The early working draft in Photoshop.


A part finished poster concept, missing character shots alongside the text.

We still don't have a good title for our project, so I'm using placeholder text for now. With any luck, the final title will be fairly similar in length to the placeholder and we'll be able to keep the offset style.

I'm fairly happy with how this poster concept is doing so far, I wanted to avoid creating an image compling to the really generic standard of a long/mid shot with a few faces super imposed over it. Whilst not escaping all of the traditional thriller movie conventions, and not being as creative as a few of the posters we've looked at, I think that the use of contrasting symmetry, asymmetry, and negative space has resulted in a fairly good looking image.

A major critism of the poster in it's current state is that it by no means indicates the primary drive in the narrative, the protaganist repeatedly playing out a situation in his mind. It's a very long way from being unique and memorable, but we will try out other ideas later if we have time, perhaps a recursivly repeating image of fractured mirror inside another, which will demonstrate the film's themes of self reflection and repetition.