Thursday, March 16, 2017

Documentary poster conventions

Conventions, conventions, my favorite things to break, but in this case I will be abiding by.

Let's start with some just overall general movie poster conventions and then we can specifically delve into documentary poster conventions.

Some typical conventions of movie posters include the following:

  • an eye-catching focal picture 
  • suggestion of the genre of the movie
  • evident tag line 
  • display of a large readable title 
  • the release date at the bottom of the poster, along with the director, actors, producers, and movie website
I will be abiding by most of them, except of course the actor credits, since I have no actors.

Now, here are some specific documentary poster conventions:
  • quotes (from either reviews or the doc itself)
  • awards (placed usually at the top of the poster) 
  • topic indicator (whether it be through the caption or background)
Here is where I will be breaking conventions. I do not like the idea of a quote on my poster, I feel like it is a bit cheesy and unnecessary, it clutters up the poster space and takes away from the poster's design. I will not be putting any awards, seeing as to how my piece is brand new. I will be adding the topic indicator in a specific caption/tagline to entice the viewer. I also want to include its method of dissemination through netflix to inform my audience of my doc's distribution. 

I will be going into the specifics of my own doc poster design in the next post!



sources:
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshare16/conventions-of-a-documentary-poster
https://www.slideshare.net/seanrdhughes/conventions-of-documentary-film-posters
https://www.pinterest.com/williebaronet/documentary-posters/
http://www.rocofilms.com/film.php?code=lion

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