The Process of creating the poster for The 13th Killing

We started by analysing trailers and looking into the features that create a poster such as the taglines, the title, main image, colours and the unique selling point.



 Once understanding how to analyse each feature we started looking into what horror posters include, how they portray there film to the audience, for example through the use of colours or the main image. We looked into the horror posters that we found inspirational from trailers, so we analysed the Thing and other relevant horrors like Sinister, Possession and The Strangers. We noted down all the common features that they included things like dark/dull colours nothing happy or bright, this is to correspond with either a dark force or the evil killer. If they used happy colours such as yellow the poster would not have the same effect on audience members they would not be intrigued into watching a horror that seems happy. The main image fills the page and this is usually the unique selling point that intrigues the audience because it shows suggestive death or something creepy for example the Possession shows a hand coming out of the girls mouth this makes the audience want to see the film as they can already tell that it is going to be scary and creepy. Other horror posters like Cabin in the Woods, represent a place revealing to the audience that the film will be revolved around this area and bad things will occur.


 After looking into horror posters we picked out the main aspects and tried to create an image in our head of what we could have on our poster. I analysed some posters with there trailers to see if i could spot the main image in any part of the trailer or something that linked the two together. For a film to be successful all the advertising products have to link to each other, showing signs of the genre and bits that will appear. If the poster fails to link to the film it therefore does not intrigue the audience as they will be confused after watching the trailer. The poster needs to reveal information about the film to tell the audience something about it otherwise they would have to work it out from the picture. The tagline has to be effective as this reveals the information to the audience if the tagline is not detailed or intriguing then people ignore it and they might not watch the film. During our research we found that many people are intrigued into watching horrors if the poster says it's based on a true story this is because it suddenly becomes more scary as you know it's happened before and it's not just been created.

We waited until we had finished the trailer before creating the poster this is because we screen grabbed some of the footage to create the poster. We looked through the trailer and found parts that we thought would interest audience members and show part of the film, without giving too much away. We screen grabbed too parts and blended them together in the poster, we placed the screen grabs on Microsoft Publisher as this was easier to crop them and change the colour. We placed one screen grab on top of the other and changed the contrast so that they fitted together. During this process we came up with the layout design, we created a tagline there and then by watching the trailer. We went for a more personal tagline then one that referred to our film, we reached to intrigue the audience by saying 'This could be you'. We copied the font for the title and placed it on the poster, along with the names of some of the actors that appeared in it. Next me and Kellie transferred it onto Photoshop so we could save it as a Jpeg, we then uploaded it to our blog. We took the images from the footage we had from the snow shots, this was to create the unique selling point that part of our film occurs in the snow, this is because many horrors happen at dark and dingy places so no one expects to see a horror in the snow.