Convention of posters

1. CONVENTION OF
POSTERS
Documentaries

2. Form of posters
A documentary on
Brazilian Formula One
racing driver Ayrton
Senna, who won the F1
world championship
three times before his
death at age 34.
It is a documentary on
the Apollo astronaut
Gene Cernan when he
steps off the moon in
December 1972, which
he has shared his own
personal story of love,
loss and fulfilment.

3. Form of posters
• Within a documentary poster, there are always a large size of font with the name of
the film, which gives the audience a clue of what is the film talking about.
• At the background there is a huge eye catching with a focal images due to the
theme of the film, which can catch the attention of the audience.
• The colour in the image contain certain specific connotation and will match to the
theme of the film, for example there are low key lighting on the poster of “The Last
Man On The Moon”, which connotes the dangerous and the unknown side of being
an astronaut as well as the space mission. On the other hand the yellow colour in
the poster of “Senna” has the connotation of Brazilian as Senna is a famous
Brazilian racing driver.
• The information of the production companies of the film will usually appear at the
bottom of the poster, alongside with the cast, institution, distribution and exhibition
companies.
• There are also the release date of the film, which tells the audience when is the
film released
• The genre of the poster will be shown somewhere on the poster, also if the film
have any nomination from the film festival, the image of the nomination will usually
on the side of the poster, e.g. top corner or top/bottom middle.

4. Where will it be?
• Film poster will always appear in the public such as transportation(Tube/Bus),
cinema, billboard etc.
Film poster will also appear in different media platform, such as the
Web2.0, social media and the magazine.

5. How we apply the convention to our
production?
• As we understand, film poster plays a very significant role in the marketing stage
as it could attract the audience’s attention to the film. From the convention
research we know there are a lot of conventions on the layout of the poster such
as the background images and the font size and font type, which we will need to
follow in our production. But in terms of the marketing of our documentary, our film
poster will be placed in public such as bus stations and the small billboard on the
street, this is because there are many people walk pass the street and the bus
station everyday so that these can increase the publicity of our documentary.
Moreover the poster will be released on the internet and social media, as it is
below the line marketing which means its free to advise the documentary. It is
suitable to our production because documentary is mostly targeting niche and
sophisticated audience, therefore bigger marketing campaign such as poster on
the bus and the tube might not be appropriate and although our documentary is
from an independent production company, so that there are only a certain amount
of budget and therefore smaller size campaign will be suitable to our production.