Weekly Updates for our Poster

Week 1
We started off by drawing out several different design ideas about what we could use as our film poster. Some of the ideas we came up with were the picture of the eye with images around it, the picture in the centre of the pupil and one where Holly was in the background and Chloe was in the foreground. However we thought that using Holly and Chloe in the poster would give too much away about the film and in our trailer it doesn't reveal who the actual murderer is and so using them in the poster would defeat the whole purpose of suspense that we wanted to create. We began looking at influences as well such as The Eye and The Last House on the Left to help us come up with ideas we could use.
After the sketches and research into our poster, we decided to eliminate the idea of using the eye as it didn't have much relevance to the film. We then began to think of key images in our film that would be effective for the poster and the most striking one was the image of the house. This was used as our final design and we then had to work out how were going to lay everything out.
Firstly we had to decide where we wanted to place the house, in the foreground or in the background. We thought that having it in the foreground would make the house seem overpowering and dominant, which is how we wanted to portray it. We really liked the idea of splitting the page into two different colours, which would hint that surrealism and things from the past may occur but still doesn't give too much away that the audience are left wondering what is going to happen. So we had one half of the poster in red and one half in black and white to show a time lapse and how things havn't really changed.

Week 2
This was the week when we started putting all our ideas onto Photoshop and seeing how they would look for real. As we wern't that confident with Photoshop it took a lot of trys to get to grips with the different features and functions of it but we finally got the hand of it. We took some location shots of the house and the ones we got were really excellent and portrayed exactly what we wanted which was a spooky, eery atmosphere. The first thing we designed was for our logo, Mack, where we had a lightening bolt going through the middle, which even though wasn't very dominant on the poster, still gave off a shock factor especially in our trailer.
We then began importing the image onto our photoshop, which took up the whole of the poster and then split the screen into half, where we turned one half into a deep, blood red colour and the other half into black and white. Next was to decide how we wanted our title to look but we didn't want to over complicate the poster, so we kept the font consistent for everything, which ended up being Optima. We had the Talbur bit on the red side in a white font and the manor bit on the black and white side in a red font. The rest of the text used was in the same font but kept all in white, so it would be easier to read. We kept the amount of writing to a minimum otherwise it would draw away from the attention of the house, which was the main image that we wanted the audience to concentrate on.
Around the house were a few trees, bushes etc..., which were useful in portraying the right atmosphere but seemed to show the same dominance as the house, which wasn't what we wanted. So we thought it would be a good idea to experiment with the blur tool for the other objects around the house, so you could still see them but they seemed to be in the background compared to the house in order to make the house look more terrifying and to stand out more.
We had Holly Bradshaw and Chloe Redman at the top of the poster, to show the main characters in the film, which if used in a real film poster, would attract the audience if the actors were well known. We kept their names in the same font as everything else in the colour white but with a light glow around it to give off a scary kind of aura.
We were initally going to have Chloe and Holly on either side of the poster holding hands to show the connection between them but we thought that this would have been too big a hint and too obvious about what the film was about, which wasn't what we wanted to do. We wanted to create as much suspense as we could and leave it up to the audience to use their imagination.