TASK 2: Movie Poster Research

Upon researching trends in modern movie posters, I found out that the colour scheme of using teal and orange is very popular and common. This is because of the basic colour theory that shows that opposites on the colour wheel attract and compliment each other. This is used for many films in the modern day across a variety of different genres. For example, it was used in action films such as Mad Max Fury Road and Iron Man 3, whilst also being used for comedies such as Vacation, and animated movies such as Epic. This is done for marketing reasons as these colours grab the audiences attention.



I do not think using teal and orange would be appropriate for our thriller, as it is too bright and may not get the message of fear that we want to portray. However, we may experiment with other opposites on the colour wheel to determine which colours would help our poster stand out. This may be difficult in the genre of a Thriller, as most posters are majority black, therefore we may only use one colour from the colour wheel rather than two.


Another theme that I discovered is the use of the actors head pasted onto the poster. This is usually with a significant location of the film on the bottom half of the poster. A reason for doing this is to use an actor, or well known character's popularity with the audience to help promote their film.

 Pirates of the Caribbean's posters all follow the same style, with the four main characters on the top half of the posters, and the significant event/location on the bottom half. This is used as the audience will associate the film series with the protagonist Jack Sparrow, therefore they use him to market the movie. Another example is the GoldenEye poster, which, like Pirates of the Caribbean, uses James Bond's popularity and significance to grab the attention of the audience. The face of Pierce Brosnan is the largest segment of the poster as this is what the audience should be drawn to first. An action sequence is also shown in the bottom half along with the title of the film.


 For both The Fifth Element and Last Knights, as these aren't part of a film franchise, they use this method in a different way. Both Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman are a list actors, and therefore the company uses their faces to market their production. Fans of the actors will associate them with the good movies they have been in and this encourages them to go and see other movies they are in. Interestingly, both Morgan Freeman and Clive Owen are the same size in the Last Knights poster, while Bruce Willis is significantly larger than his co-stars on The Fifth Element Poster. This may be because they were less recognizable at the time, and attention didn't want to be taken from Bruce Willis. Alternatively, like in Pirates of the Caribbean, the sizes could correlate with the significance of the character's role in the film.