Film Poster - Interim Crit

This morning was the interim crit for our film poster brief, where we were required to bring in 3 initial designs that we could potentially use for our posters. The 3 that I took are below, I also left brief descriptions of each poster.

My Ideas

Idea 1

Throughout the film the assassin arranges to pay or get payed by various people “half now, half on delivery”. I find this ironic given that in the end he doesn’t deliver what he was paid to do, whereas the convicted terrorist that was let out of prison to help catch him did.

Idea 2

The assassin uses various disguises throughout the film, all of which wear sunglasses to cover his eyes, as well as having massively different hair. One of the tensest parts of the film is when he removes his glasses to look one of the people after him directly in the eye before attempting to shoot him. The idea also runs with a quote from the end of the film, “I wonder if we’ll ever know who the hell he was”, which was one of the quotes that stuck in my head, due to the fact that even though the assassin had been killed he still remains nameless and faceless.

Idea 3

The film was initially advertised as a Bruce Willis and Richard Gere film. But Sidney Poitier also has a huge role in the film, and is the only FBI agent that isn’t killed by the assassin while they’re trying to stop him. He is changed by the experience of losing his colleagues to a brutal murderer. The poster shows him at the beginning of the film when the plot kicks off, just after his partner saves his life by shooting a Russian warlord, only to be killed herself later because that was the act that spurred the plot.

Feedback

I asked people which poster they thought was the most mysterious, which had the most potential for development, and which could be most iconic.

The feedback was generally that 2 and 3 were a lot more mysterious than 1, with 3 being slightly more mysterious than number 2, but reading the comments that's because the character looks like he's hatching some sort of evil scheme, which I know isn't appropriate in context of the film. Because of this, I'd say idea number 2 was most successful in terms of this question.

The answers to the second and third questions were fairly unanimous in that idea 2 had the most potential for development and were a lot more iconic, with only a single person disagreeing on either question.

From this, I think it's fairly obvious that I should take the second idea forward, the general feedback on the idea was:

• The characters are recognisable to people who've seen the film, but the concept of it is interesting enough to make people who haven't seen it intrigued.
• The concept is good, but the vectoring needs improving.
• The lack of colour gives it quite a serious tone of voice.
• The composition could be experimented with and improved.
• It reminds people of reservoir dogs and the godfather.

I think all of the feedback on it is fair and very encouraging. In truth I didn't put a lot of effort into the vectoring because I didn't want to spend loads of time on a design that I might not be taking forward, so I definitely understand the comment about the vectors themselves. But all the 1st, 3rd and 5th point were all the sort of feedback I was hoping for, and I think it means a lot because I didn't ask questions that lead people towards those answers. The comment about composition was useful because I fear that I might have ignored it slightly had someone not commented on it.

Next Steps

I think the most important thing to do next is to re-vector the characters to a higher standard, as this will allow me to play with composition more due to being able to overlap the images. I currently wouldn't be able to overlap the images because their hair would just merge due to it being block colour, whereas if it was more detailed this wouldn't be the case.