Ancillary Task 1 - Poster

The Making of:

Here I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to create a poster for my short film. After plenty of research into fashionable posters, I decided to create two posters, of which one would be the final product.
The first poster was inspired by some of the posters from the artwork "The Social Network". 
For both of the posters I decided it would be important to use a the portrait of the subject (Tom) which is extremely common in documentary posters and gives an insight into the person it is about. However, the thick bar of text obstructs the viewer from seeing Tom's eyes, blocking the relationship with the reader and therefore imitating the affect of autism and not being able to understand the facial expressions and emotions of other people. I also used a black and white colour scheme to create a similar effect and to emphasise the dramatic story.

My second poster was inspired by the current trend of "vintage" and "retro" styled posters of modern films, in particular that of "Cowboys & Aliens" and "The American". This poster has a much more artistic feel than the previous but sticks to using the Helvetica typeface, a very stylish and popular font used in documentaries today. I also used other elements of typography such as letter spacing to make the letters closer together, creating an aesthetic effect. The spiral in the background is used merely to mimic the retro design, but can perhaps focus the reader's attention into Tom, making a connection. This leads on to the image of Tom itself; I wanted to create a vintage effect and researched into several methods into what worked best. I found that a "Gradient Map" using a vintage colour swatch worked best.  To finish, I found an image of an aeroplane in the sky, to conotate Tom's struggle of getting into aviation, this acts as a sort of snippet into the documentary.

The Final Product:

Before I chose a final product, I gave my peer group a chance to pick one and give feedback. After much discussion, I came to realise that neither poster had a strong "documentary" feel to it. I was recommended to keep the black and white theme, but to use Tom's image in a different manner and perhaps make the typography a lot larger. 
To create this image, I added a "motion blur" in Photoshop and then a "Film Grain" which gave the affect that the image was created by long exposure. This blurred image mimics the characteristics of Autism by blurring the face and making it obscure, as Autism sufferers cannot understand facial expressions. The large text also blocks the face and also makes the story more appealing to watch. To add a more professional feel, I used the font "Steel Tongs" to mimic a professional film poster's credits. Overall I feel this poster worked extremely well and convinced me to use it as my final product.