Ideas For My Film Poster

From my previous research into film posters for 'The Uninvited' and 'Brick' I noticed these conventions that I would like to include in my own poster:

• Strong contrast between light and dark -creates mystery and unease as there are strong shadows that contrast with soft (but bright) light areas...This is especially effective on faces as their identity then seems ambiguous.
• People -rather than having a main picture of the setting, the posters I looked at are focused on a figure. As I also looked at the trailers for the films the figures featured on the posters are main characters.
• Limited colour palette -although most of the posters I looked at included colour, the palette was very limited. For example one poster I looked at (for 'Brick') included just blue tones, whilst a poster for 'The Uninvited' had grey tones. I feel the lack of variation in colour makes the image featured more striking as the viewer isn’t distracted by a wide variation of colour.
• Mystery – the posters I looked at all had an element of mystery and ambiguity to them, through the use of shadow (that I described earlier) that may make the viewer question events in the film even before seeing it..
• Taglines, Comments & Ratings – the comments and ratings from newspapers or film magazines are usually in a light coloured font to contrast with the darker background. The tagline is usually below the title of the film, in a very small font so as not to draw attention away from the title.
• Grain of images – in most of the posters I looked at (plus posters from ‘Se7en’ (D.Fincher 1995) and ‘The Silence of The Lambs’ (J.Demmes 1991) the images are quite grainy rather than crisp and sharp which gives the impression of age or a memory. This then links to a common feature of psychological thrillers – the flashback.
  

I hope to incorporate these main conventions of psychological thriller film posters in my own poster. I’ll use close-ups of faces of the main characters (in my trailer) illuminated very dimly to create mystery and drama. I will experiment with different compositions and layouts for the images I use and the text to feature on it. I will experiment with incorporating different images for a more complex poster, and just using one image. After exploring different layouts I will decide on one poster that best represents and suits my film.