The Process of Making My Short Film Poster Draft - Photoshop Draft of Short Film Poster - Sam Swinson

The Process of Making My Short Film Poster Draft - Photoshop Draft of Short Film Poster - Sam Swinson

I have created a draft of what the poster for our short film could look like. I created this draft in Photoshop which is an Adobe photo editing package used by lots of professional artists. This piece of software is often used to create real film posters because of all the tools that it offers to the user. To create the Photoshop draft we went out to take some pictures that were very high resolution so that they could be printed out and not look blurry. Then I added the conventions of a short film poster to the picture and saved the whole poster as a high-quality A3 picture document.

Step By Step:

There were lots of steps involved with creating the final Photoshop Draft for the short film poster which are as follows:
Step 1:
The first thing I did was to create a new Photoshop document which would be the starting point for the short film poster. This is where all the different elements of the short film poster will be assembled together. The size of the document is an A3 piece of paper. However, the way photoshop originally set up the document was in portrait and I wanted my poster in landscape. Therefore, I switched the height and the width of the document to make it landscape. Also, I upped the resolution of the document from 200 to 600 because if these pictures are printed then the higher the resolution is then the less chance there is of the poster looking blurry when it is printed.

Step 2:
Once the document has been created I placed a background image in the document. This would be the focus of the poster which meant I had to choose my image very carefully. Once the image was in the document I adjusted the size of the images so that I looked better and it would fit in with the elements of a short film poster better.

Step 3:
Then I added some effects to the background image. Firstly I used a paint brush that was very soft and paint black over the protagonist on a new layer. Then on another new layer, I painted white with a soft brush over the protagonist's friend. Then I lowered the opacity on both of these layers so that they were almost transparent. This gives a subtle effect making the protagonist seem darker and the protagonist's friend seem lighter whilst keeping the background as it was. Then I added a small vignette border to the background image which darkens the corners of the background imaged and it makes the center of the image seem lighter.

Step 4:
Then I added the title of the short film to the poster. The title of the short film is 'Alone'. We have to use the same font for the title on the film poster as we used in the short film itself which meant I used a font called 'Bebas Neue'. This title and the font were appropriate for our short film for reasons that I explained in an earlier post. Once the title was placed on the image I kept zooming in and out to see what the poster would look like small and what it would look like big. After doing this I realised I would have to add an effect to the title to make it stand out more from the background. I tried 2 different ways of doing this and I ended up going with the second version of it because I felt it looked better. When placing the title on the screen I used guides to find the centre of the document and then made sure that the middle of the O was in the middle of the screen.

Title Effect Version 1

Title Effect Version 2

Step 5:
The next thing that I did was to add some review summaries and some star ratings for the short film. For the star ratings, I found some pictures of stars on the internet and then imported them into my document and aligned them with some summary reviews. The summary reviews are the single words of phrases that are used to entice the audience into watching the short film. I used some guides to help line up the reviews part of the poster and make sure that it is pixel perfect. I used guides at the edge of the title which lined up with the edge of the summary reviews. Also, I lined the star ratings up in the middle of the summary reviews.

Step 6:
Then I created some awards that would be displayed on the short film poster. To do this I looked at some real short film awards from places like the London Film Festival and then I created my own. I obtained a picture of some Laurel Leaves which are the bits that go around the awards. Then I added text in between the leaves saying 'Best Short Film' and 'Best Narrative'. Then I placed these awards below the title and this added some symmetry to the poster.

Step 7:
After this, I created and added a billing block or a credit block to the bottom of my poster. This was very simple to do because there is a credit block font that allows you to create the billing block easily. All I had to do was adjust the size of certain parts of the font. For example, the names of people involved were big 'Sam Swinson' and the additional parts were small 'Edited By'. Then I placed the billing block at the bottom of the poster, but, I was not right at the bottom because I left space for company logos.

Step 8:
Next, I added some logos from companies underneath the billing block right at the bottom of the poster. I added the London Film Festival logo and the Lottery Logo. Also, I added the White Woolf Productions Logo to the side of the poster in the corner because that is the production company that makes this short film.

Different Parts of the Poster:

Here are the main parts of the poster that I have created:

• Awards & Reviews

• Billing Block

• Title

• White Wolf Productions Logo

Decisions:

Through the process of created my Photoshop draft of my short film poster I had to make some decisions about the look of the poster and the information on the poster.

• Firstly, I had to decide what image I was going to use for the background image of the poster. I narrowed this selection down to 3 pictures. The reason I decided to choose the image that I did was because it looked very visually appealing and it gets the audience thinking when they look at it.

• Another decision I had to make was the font style of the title. I had two different versions of the title and both looked good on the poster. However, I decided to go with the second of the two font styles because it looked better from a distance and stood out more from the background.

Changes to the Poster:

After reviewing my short film poster, I have had to change on an aspect of the short film poster. The change I made can be seen below:

What I have done is remove the star rating from the short film poster because often the companies that review the short film they won't give a star rating to the film. Additionally, I have added a line of text under the summary review which states the name of the company that gave the review. This is done in the same font as the summary review, however, it is a smaller text size than the other word because it is less important. This gave me more room to increase the size of the summary review text because the star ratings previously took up a lot of space. On the other hand, I didn't make the text too big because when it is printed out on A3 I want to make sure that the summary review doesn't take away from the title of the short film. Furthermore, I have changed the colour of the 'Best Narrative' awards that is in between the two summary reviews. I did this because having the two awards in different colours made the poster look disjointed so now having them both white with a black outline makes them stand out from the background and it doesn't make the poster seem disjointed.