Codes and Conventions for Thriller Movie Posters

Codes and Conventions for Thriller

Movie PostersBy Sam Burgess

• One of the ancillary tasks is to create a poster for the film.  Film posters are a form of advertisement for movies. However unlike film trailers, posters are physical items, so they can be placed almost anywhere.

• The most common places these posters are found are: along the side of buses, in magazines, on billboards, and inside cinemas themselves.

Research• Posters are designed very differently. To have an

understanding of what codes and conventions the genre and posters usually have, I researched 9 different thriller (as I plan to create a thriller trailer) movie posters. The 9 posters I looked at were:

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

The Untouchables (1987)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Seven (1995)

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Memento (2000)

The Dark Knight (2008)

Inception (2010)

Gone Girl (2014)

ProtagonistThe lead of each film stands in the foreground and in the centre of every poster, on most of them their character takes up the most amount of space. This is to draw your attention to who the protagonist of the film will be.

Tag line• 7 of the 9 posters

incorporate a tag line, the tag line is a convention used to increase excitement. Advertisers also aim to create a tag line that the audience will remember easily. So whenever they think of the phrase, they will think of the movie.

Text• 8 of the 9 include the lead

actor’s name in bold, if the actor is well recognised the studio are likely to use their name to sell the movie. Also the marketing team are likely to copy the title’s font and use it for the actor’s names.

• This also applies to directors that are “big”.

Colour• Almost all the posters use

black, some use it to create a dark mood, others use it to emphasize the brighter parts of the poster. Every poster’s title is created in a colour which is completely opposite the colour of the background. Making the title of the film stand out is essential to a film poster.

Image• The most important

aspect of a film poster is the main image. The image will use up most of the space on the poster, so the designers need to make it very interesting.

• Some posters incorporate the theme of the film into their image.