Movie Poster

Part of my film opening takes place in a press junket interview with the main character promoting his new film. To make the scene feel more realistic, I decided to create a poster for the movie that the main character is promoting. The film titled "Fatal Risk" is a cheesy, stereotypical action movie with an equally cheesy poster. To make sure I made an accurate film poster for the time I researched multiple film posters from the 80s time period and analyzed the common techniques used throughout the examples. 

Examples:

The Terminator was an action film released in 1984 and became one of the most famous action films from that decade. The poster for this film captures the gritty action genre that dominated the 80s through its use of striking red in the lettering and across the subject. The use of red is eye-catching and fits well with the tone that it is trying to convey. With this in mind, I decided to use red as the main color of the poster.

This poster comes from the 1986 film, Cobra, starring Sylvester Stallone as the main character. Similar to the Terminator poster, this film poster's central focus and subject is the main character, who takes up most of the space in the poster. I used this element in my own poster, with the main character being right in the center of the poster. This poster also includes a red color scheme, this time with a gradient in the background. For my poster, I took some inspiration from the background and included a gradient in the back.

This movie poster is from the film "Die Hard" and was released in 1988. A common technique shown throughout these posters, is the inclusion of a cheesy tagline usually written in white and lowercase, while the title is in all capital letters and red. I took inspiration from this technique and included it into my own poster, which helped to make a truly convincing poster that seems like it could be from the 80s. The use of red and capital letters in the title really pop out to viewers and are iconic to the action film genre, especially in the 80s.

Result:

After compiling elements from the different poster examples, I was able to create a realistic depiction of what an action movie poster from the 80s would look like. I included a mainly red and blue color scheme like the examples and even included a cheesy tagline. Manuel, one of the members in my group, is the main character in both the opening and this fictional film, so it was essential that he was the main focus of the poster. The poster took much more time than it should've, mainly because I had a lot of trouble cutting Manuel out of the picture he sent me. The picture he sent was slightly low quality and getting a detailed cut out of his hair was a nightmare, but I was able to solve the problem and in the end it worked out.