Poster Conventions - Introduction and Analysis

For my first research task I will be analysing posters from a variety of genres in terms of conventions of design and layout that they all share, so that I can include as many of these conventions in my poster when I create it.

I have chosen "Dark Shadows" from the Fantasy genre, "What Happens in Vegas" from the Romantic Comedy genre "We need to talk about Kevin" from the Drama genre, "Lawless" from the Gangster genre and "Stolen" from the Action genre. I am going to see if I can find out whether or not conventions are the same in these five posters even though they are all from different genres. The first poster I will annotate is for the film "Dark Shadows".

Conventions I spotted that I feel are common to film posters included: taglines, reference to genre, prominent film title, reference to stars, dominant central image of star which also indicates genre, billing at the bottom of the poster, production company and sound logos, website, release date and the name of the director. I will now look at a poster from a completely different genre (the Drama "We Need to Talk About Kevin") to see if they share the same conventions. I suspect that many of the general conventions will be the same, though there may be slight differences as this is a low-budget independent film, rather than a star-driven Hollywood genre movie.

This poster shared similar conventions despite being from a different genre and also being an independent film. Additional features, specific to this kind of film, included: quotations from reviews, reference to awards and reference to the novel that the film was based on. For my third poster I wanted to look at a poster that was almost the antithesis of the first two, so I looked at the poster for the romantic comedy "What Happens in Vegas". As expected, the majority of conventions were the same as before, particularly those found on the poster for "Dark Shadows".

My fourth poster was again from a different genre - this time "Lawless", a gangster film - however all of the typical conventions were the same as in the other posters, blending those found in posters for both mainstream and independent films.

For my final poster I decided to look at "Stolen" which is a blockbuster action film, starring A-list actor Nicholas Cage. Again, there was a large degree of consistency in terms of the conventions I found.

From doing this task, I have learnt that the majority of film posters share similar conventions regardless of the genre they are from. When creating the poster for my imaginary film I now know which conventions to include to make it look more authentic.