Layout ideas for Poster and Billboard

Poster Layouts

In a film poster, the title is often simplistic and short, especially in the psychological thriller genre, a shorter title means that it can take up a large proportion of the screen without being to overwhelming and confusing. The placing of the title, can be dependent on the image as it needs to be placed so that it doesn't draw attention away from the main image. Therefore, by creating sketches with more than one title location, it gives more opportunity to experiment with the images.

It could be argued that the film posters which create the most impact, is the ones where there isn't too much text or graphology, with the main impact being in the image. Therefore, I only used the most important features that will give the audience enough information and get their interest. 

From audience research the most popular layout sketch was found to be the 6th, this was the one of the layouts which had the least amount of informations in the middle part of the sketch. This leaves more room for the image, when taking my genre into consideration it was thought that the most important feature on the page would be the image that would need to have a longer lasting effect on the audience and convey fear, paranoia and building tension.

This is an example of typical films in the psychological thriller. It illustrates how this format has already been shown as being used for existing film in a successful way. Therefore, when planning to create my own posters, I would be more likely to pick this format and then adapt to suit my own images. This makes production easier as I already have feedback on what structure is most suited and therefore have a longer period of time for further development.

Billboard Layouts

Due to the size of a billboard, it gives more room in the structure for larger fonts and information. It also means that the image used needs to be landscape, therefore, more characters can be used within the image. Similarly, there can be a larger proxemics between the characters with more room, this can give a better idea to the audience what the character relationships are. The purpose of a billboard, means that it needs to catch attention quickly, this means that image has to have a large and fast impact on the audience with the name of the film being prominent enough for the audience to remember after. The 4th and 5th layout ideas are less likely to be used for mockups at this stage because there is too much information that could potentially block parts of the image as well as distract from the title. The examples of existing billboards bellow illustrate how little information around a large image has a large impact and can be more memorable to the audience.