Film Poster Design - From Start to Finish

Background Information:

So for the final project we were tasked to create a film poster for one of our favourite movies. My first idea was to create a poster for Tim Burtons Alice in Wonderland, I wanted to create for this a rather contemporary film poster, this meant for the research phase of this project my focus surrounded film posters that were contemporary and modern. 

Research:

http://ollymoss.com/ - Olly Moss was my first port of call, It is here were I got several ideas about what I wanted my film poster to look like and how I would set it out. I particularly liked his posters designs from the Jungle Book and Star Wars. I loved how they used a head silhouette, and then used a key scene from the movies or aspects of the movies in the silhouette. 

It was after looking at these I decided to base my film poster on Tomb Raider, after this being a movie franchise a couple of years back I decided to create a modern up to date movie poster. This time though I used to 2013 release of the game as the topic for the film poster. The game focuses on Lara becoming a survivor instead of this wise innocent girl. 

I decided that my next move would be to look at older film poster from all of the Tomb Raider franchise and see what featured as a key image/aspect of the movies and posters. In most of these films there is a focus on the double hand pistols, or the artefacts that Lara is out to discover.

Hand Drawn Sketches of example film posters

Creating the Poster: 

So here Im going to show how I created my my film poster. 

As you can see I haven't shown any screenshots of how I created any of the text and how I added in the poster credits and captioning. I used one of the quotes from IMDb which basically helps to highlight what some of the most important quotes from the video games itself.

I decided with the text than rather leaving it in one colour I capitalised certain words and put them in white help emphasis the meaning of the video game/film. I also overlapped and spaced out the title 'Tomb Raider' and tried to keep it fairly similar to the actual video game makers title and logo. 

Gun Silhouette 

So for the centre image I decided to focus on Tomb Raiders trade mark equipment of the hand gun, In every poster and in the video games as well Lara is always seen to have the the double hand pistols. So I used this as my centre image, However just a black gun in the middle of the poster didn't look very effect so I defiantly had to change it and create something better. 

Tomb Raider 2013

The image above is taken from the Tomb Raider game, and I felt that the image was perfect to use for this film poster. It shows Lara learning how to become a survivor and not this innocent girl who can't fend for herself. I once again decided that the image would look better in black and white, however I thought that if I emphasised the flame coming off of the arrow it would draw more attention and highlight the fact that Lara is a dangerous women. 

Tomb Raider Fire Highlight  2013
By selecting the fire it meant I was able to create the flame to look darker and much more dangerous, I changed it by changing the curves, editing the contrast and brightness and by making the filter on the fire a more of an orangey colour.  However though I decided to change it back to just black and white, because by having the flame in the image it ruined the look of the image and I felt it didn't work as well when the image was in black and white. 

Adding image to gun/ gradient fill
Okay so here I managed to copy the silhouette of the gun and cut into the image to make it look like the image look the same shape as the gun, I did however add a gradient effect that starts in the bottom of the gun, and then gradually clears towards the end of the pistol. I felt this created a pretty good look on the gun itself.  

Final Poster

So here is the final poster, again I feel this another professional looking piece but like all the other projects it does have its flaws. I would have liked the 'Tomb Raider' to have been a little bolder and the font to have looked and bit chunkier. I would have also liked to have had to guns instead of one but when practising this I felt that the poster looked to crowded so I decided to keep the single gun.