Film Poster Research

There are two main types of film posters: films that tell you about the movie and posters that tell you about a specific character. Most films tend to have some of each, mainly for marketing purposes. An example is the film Inglourious. They have a film poster which features all of the principal characters and the film's tagline, like so:

Then they have individual character posters of all the characters, so people can pick their favourite character and choose them:

Another example is Batman: The Dark Knight. This again, has a film poster for general release with the tagline, as well as character posters with individual taglines:

There are also several websites on the internet that have many film posters in them. An example is filmsite.org, a site which features many "classic and vintage film posters". Their site features links to another site, allposters.com, which sells over 18,000 film posters.

It's obvious that film posters are vitally important to a film. They advertise to the general public, as well as providing a way for people to take a part of the cinema experience home with them.

As such, it's very important that we get our film poster right, specifically with the mood of the poster. The theme of the film needs to be subtle given the delicate nature of the product, and this needs to be reflected in the poster.

The poster from the film we researched, The Accused, does this. The poster belies tiny hints as to the nature of the film, without going into too much detail. However, it also seems a little lacking in some way. For our own poster, it would be good to match the sensitivity of this poster while improving on it's weaknesses.