Joseph Donaldson designed a horror film poster featuring a spooky close-up of the villain to convey the genre effectively, utilizing a predominantly black-and-white color scheme with blood-red lips to evoke danger. He employed sinister fonts and a classy director image to attract a more sophisticated audience, while ensuring the magazine's sophisticated house style. The film has a 15 certificate, aligning with common psychological horror standards, to appeal to the target audience of young adults.

1. Joseph Donaldson

2. I included a number of generic features in my poster, to not
only make a good poster but so people viewing it will know the
film is a horror, and not a comedy for example. One of the main
features is the spooky photo, I took an extreme close up of our
villain looking very creepy, a lot like the poster for the film
‘Contracted’ (2013). The reason I done this is because the
audience will almost feel intimidated
by Caitie’s face and they’ll automatically
know what kind of film this poster is
advertising. When taking the photos, one
thing I noticed straight away is that there
isn’t much colour, mainly black and white
which I thought looked great because it
almost connotes the darkness of the film and
how scary it will be but I really wanted a bit
of red on the poster. I chose to colour in
Caitie’s lips in a blood red colour to give the
connotation of danger and fear. I think this
works really well as not only does it have a
hidden meaning, but it sticks out from far
away, which is likely to draw an audience in. Another generic
feature I used was a creepy font. I used a website called DaFont
to get the cool typewriter font. I thought this font worked really
well with the rest
of my poster as it looks quite sinister and connotes that this horror film is a real
story as it would have been documented on a typewriter. My favourite font was the
font I used for the characters names and the ‘coming soon’. This looks very
paranormal as it is shifty, like a ghost. A lot of psychological horror films use this
style of font, like ‘Grave Encounters’ (2011).

3. This photo of Joe is one of him dressed up to look like a classy
director, as my magazine is aimed at a more classy audience
rather than the typical middle class audience that read the
popular film magazines like Total Film and Empire. With the
photo I used chiaroscuro to show that this addition of my
magazine is one about horrors, which goes along nicely with all
of my cover lines. Obviously every magazine has a barcode,
date, prise and issue number so I added these in places that
other film magazines would. One thing that I made sure I done
was to cut Joe’s head out using the magnetic lasso tool and
then paste the head on a new layer above my masthead so I
could put the
masthead behind his head, like a lot of
popular magazines do, especially Total Film
and Empire. This gives the readers a sense
of exclusivity, that they know something
that a random reader wouldn't, especially
because they know what the masthead
says,
which is quite difficult to read with Joe’s head in the way.
All the colours and fonts used in my magazine cover are
very similar so I can keep up a sophisticated house style.
I also added two graphics on the bottom left hand side.
This was my horror poster and another member of my
groups horror poster. I added these to give the reader
another reason to buy the magazine as not only are the
getting a magazine full of fun and useful
information, they’re getting free posters. A lot of
magazines do this, from music magazines, to wildlife
magazines. You can see that Total Film also do this as this
is a popular demand from regular readers.

4. Both of my ancillary products go together well. They are both for a
more mature and classy audience and I think they compliment each
other well. Although the target audience for my trailer is
predominantly lower class young adults, I feel that the high class
audience would enjoy it as well. I think my trailer and ancillary
products are quite similar to ‘The Woman in Black’ and the target
audience for that was both higher and lower class.
The certificate for ‘Lullaby’ is a 15 as when doing our research, we
found that most psychological horrors were a 15 certificate and we
didn’t feel like we had enough gore/violence in our film to make it an
18. Also, the 3 years between the ages of 15 and 18 are very
important as a lot of our audience would be around this age and
they wouldn’t be able to go see it at cinemas, which does not only
lose us money, but it also upsets our target audience. For my
poster, I didn’t want to make anything too scary but I also didn’t
want to make it too mild so I think the use of chiaroscuro along with
the scary photo works perfectly and ties in well with my 15
certificate. My magazine was different as I didn’t want to make a
scary magazine as it wasn’t just about horrors, it also includes other
genre’s of film so I avoided the scary side of it and just went for the
stereotypical magazine look.
Like most horrors, the target audience isn't the mainstream.
Although horrors are enjoyed by a lot of people, they don’t have a