CONVENTION OF POSTERS Documentaries

Form of posters A documentary on Brazilian Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna, who won the F1 world championship three times before his death at age 34.

It is a documentary on the Apollo astronaut

Gene Cernan when he steps off the moon in

December 1972, which he has shared his own personal story of love,

loss and fulfilment.

Form of posters • Within a documentary poster, there are always a large size of font with the name of the

film, which gives the audience a clue of what is the film talking about. • At the background there is a huge eye catching with a focal images due to the theme of

the film, which can catch the attention of the audience. • The colour in the image contain certain specific connotation and will match to the theme

of the film, for example there are low key lighting on the poster of “The Last Man On The Moon”, which connotes the dangerous and the unknown side of being an astronaut as well as the space mission. On the other hand the yellow colour in the poster of “Senna” has the connotation of Brazilian as Senna is a famous Brazilian racing driver.

• The information of the production companies of the film will usually appear at the bottom of the poster, alongside with the cast, institution, distribution and exhibition companies.

• There are also the release date of the film, which tells the audience when is the film released

• The genre of the documentary will be shown on the poster, usually from the nomination of film and the tagline. The tagline might tell the audience the genre of the film as it usually use sophisticated wording or quotes to attract the sophisticated audience. On the other hand it will be obvious to understand the genre of the film from the nomination, this is because it will categorise and be specific about the genre of film so that audience will know what prize does the film get.

Composition convention • The rule of thirds is applied by aligning a subject with the guide lines and

their intersection points, placing the horizon on the top or bottom line, or allowing linear features in the image to flow from section to section. The lines can help the photographer to identify the four important parts in the photograph and also to balance the position of the element within the picture.

• It is very common to apply the rule of third into the focal image in film poster, however, there are also example of film poster which didn’t use the rule of third, and they are still effective in terms of attracting the audiences

Where will it be? • Traditional film poster will always appear in the public such as

transportation(Tube/Bus), cinema, billboard etc.

Film poster will also appear in different media platform, such as the Web2.0, social media and the magazine.

What about documentary posters?• However, as documentary is targeting on specific type of niche audience, so that it

might not be a good idea to have documentary poster in public places such as billboard, high street etc. Moreover, due to the limited of budget, independent film company will not be able to afford the price of big advertising. Therefore to be able to target the correct audiences, documentary tend to promote the poster by using below the line marketing such as social media and web2.0 to attract the audience.

• For our documentary’s we would using social media and web 2.0 to attract the primary audience as they are still digital natives. On the other hand for the secondary audience we would also like to advertise on related magazine such as The Artists and Drama, this is because they are sophisticated and willing spend money on buying these magazines.

How we apply the convention to our production?

• As we understand, film poster plays a very significant role in the marketing stage as it could attract the audience’s attention to the film. From the convention research we know there are a lot of conventions on the layout of the poster such as the background images and the font size and font type, which we will need to follow in our production. But in terms of the marketing of our documentary, the poster will be released on the internet and social media, as it is below the line marketing which means its free to advertise the documentary. Moreover the poster will publish in sophisticated creative industry related magazine such as “The Artists” and “The Drama”, this is because the our secondary audience are more likely to purchase these magazine and these marketing methods are suitable to our production because documentary is mostly targeting niche and sophisticated audience, therefore bigger marketing campaign such as poster on the bus and the tube might not be appropriate and because of our documentary is from an independent production company, so that there are only a certain amount of budget and therefore smaller size campaign will be suitable to our production.