Movie poster Evaluation

Graphic Evaluation: Movie Poster & DVD Sleeve 

Introduction 

When reading back to my proposal I spoke about creating a fantasy/sci-fi movie poster that was based around a video game that I made up. The game based in the film is a VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) I gave it the name Virtualis Vinctum, Meaning ‘Virtual Prisoner’ in Latin. 

Research & Ideas Stage 

I began my research by producing some mind maps, which helped me with my ideas on paper. From this, I decided on the type of movie genre I wanted to produce. I chose to do two different genres, which when mixed together create a hybrid genre; these genres are Fantasy and Sci-fi, which I stated when writing up my proposal.for more in depth research I analysed three different fantasy/sci-fi movie poster and DVD sleeves. These posters were (        ) 

Once I had planned the design for my poster and DVD sleeve, this gave me an idea on the age ratings. It was later decided that the age rating would be a 15, because of the mature themes that games usually have and that in a VRMMORPG it is perfectly okay to kill people in order to level up. 

I next analysed some posters that were both related to my theme and also had similarities to each other. Each poster had somewhat different messages and also different ways that they showed their characters. 

a basic story for the poster was needed, in which I came up with the storyline of humans being sucked into this game like a virus taking over the humans that lay this specific game, using the humans as pawns inside the virtual world, with no way out at all, leaving them prisoners to this broken virtual world. 

For the design work I made some basic layouts, the only one that seemed suitable was the half real half drawn character design. 

When I decided to have the poster represent both the real and the virtual worlds. I firstly needed to find someone who could be my main character on my finished product; I took photos of my classmates and a few neighbouring class mates to try to come to a decision on who to use and after careful deciding, I picked Melissa Collier to be the character, in order to make the character look serious I asked Melissa to give me a glare, this made the poster serious because the character looked annoyed or rebellious. 

Next I had to plan the way I wanted the poster to look, I created three designs to show how it would be displayed. Most of the planning designs kept links into the theme of game coding and animation. I wanted it to look like the character was in the system of the game. 

I next needed a synopsis so that I had a basic storyline of how the movie would be brought out if it were actually going to be turned into a film. My synopsis is: 

“Hundreds and thousands of kids are slowly growing addicted to games, it makes them secluded. But all of a sudden, kids have been going missing, no trace left, are the games abducting them?’ 

Development of the poster 

For the development through Photoshop I had to cut Melissa’s face in half, I did this using the cut tool. Picking which side of her face to use was next on the agenda, picking the right side of the face was the result. After that I began to design her game character, making it a semi realistic comic book themed drawing. The tools I used on Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 were the pencil tool, the quick selection tool, the paintbrush tool and the mixer brush tool, a handy usb drawing tablet was also used in order for me to even draw the character. Hue and saturation were used as well to give the characters a dramatic effect, the burn tool was used to give it a sinister-like look. 

I then took to google to find a perfect back ground for the poster, at first I found a nice fantasy one, which featured fantasy like trees and forests, but when I tried it against the image of my character it didn’t look very put together or professional, so I searched for a more sci-fi themed back ground, which resulted in a nice coding background.i then took the image to Photoshop and began morphing it into my character picture/drawing. using a variation of hues and overlay tools to blend the character. 

After finishing the background off I then needed to get the font for the title, credits, tagline and blurb sorted out. I went to DaFont to look for suitable fonts that could fit into the theme of fantasy and sci-fi. for the title I found a font called Codex, which looked like the fancy large letters that are seen as the first letter in a fairy tale book. For the rest of the writing such as the blurb, tagline and the credits area of the poster and DVD sleeve I used a font name Code. It was pixelated like the old games and had a Tetris-like look to it. 

After some time my computer corrupted the original work and it hard to be re done all over again, to which i made adjustments.

Finished product- both the movie poster & DVD Sleeve 

When the project was finally complete I was proud with how it had turned out, it looked exactly how I imagined it to look back in the planning stages, but with only some slight changes. 

In my proposal I had spoken about it having a more even mix or fantasy and sci-fi, but the final project turned out a little more sci-fi, such as the way the character merges into the background, this shows that she was part of the coding, and essentially, a video game is mostly sci-fi, the fantasy was kept in the fact that the game character was given elven ears and a more olive tone compared to the real life human character. 

I found there were many advantages in the design and making of this movie poster/DVD sleeve, such as how the drawing turned out for the final product. The drawing was mentioned earlier in this evaluation as being a tablet drawing done by myself. it was one of the few times I had ever used the drawing tablet, it was my third go at using a tablet when I created the drawing. It was quite a hard drawing to do, since I had to make the drawing look both cartoon like and also realistic, somewhat like the drawings you see in marvel and DC comics. I was proud with how I created the effect of making my character somewhat morph into the background, as if she was stuck in the games internal coding systems, this would give the audience the impression of the characters imprisonment which I'm glad it shows in the final product.  

I believe there were some minor faults in the poster such as the editing of  both the real and drawn face, I feel as if I missed a vital bit out, and then during the making of it I had to begin the poster all over again due to a fault in my memory stick function, it had made the original file empty, taking away all my hard work, but to achieve this poster it only took a matter of days, maybe about a week and a half at most to complete it again with some help to recover the things I needed that could have gotten lost. 

in conclusion I feel proud at my work, both the movie poster and the DVD sleeve came out exactly as I would have liked and if this film was to become a real movie in waiting I believe that it will catch the audiences attention and make them come to see the film in cinemas and perhaps buy the DVD from the shops.