The document discusses poster design for a science fiction movie. It analyzes several existing science fiction movie posters that use simplistic single-character imagery and minimal text. The document concludes that following genre conventions, such as these poster styles, helps guarantee audience satisfaction. For their own poster, the author decided to use stills from the movie trailer featuring a serious young actor in a headset, and will include a tagline and focus on simplistic one-character imagery to match expectations set by successful precedents.

1. Poster Images Ideas – The
History behind them and my
reasoning.

2. What images am I using?
• For my poster I decided to use stills from my movie trailer. In this way
I could achieve the same effect and theme you would see when
watching the movie. I hoped by doing this the trailer and poster
would stick in the audience’s mind with equal effect interlinking with
one another and reminding audience’s to seek out and watch the
movie- as you would expect them to do based on the uses and
gratifications theory.

3. My Images:

7. This poster of one of the biggest science fiction movies ever uses the
same sort of image as we see here. While the striking thing here is the
CGI used to generate the alien imagery, I hope the seriousness of my
young actor in a headset would have the same effect. Young people are
not commonly associated with such things and I hoped this shock would
in many ways be the same as the Avatar poster seen here. This also sees
only one character as the poster image meaning there is precedent for
doing so. The poster is simplistic and minimalistic, something I hope to
incorporate on my poster.
The Research:

8. This poster again displays precedent for a simplistic style in imagery for science
fiction (focussed on the egg). There is a focus on one image with minimal text.
This is something I hope to copy in my poster, while of course the plot lines of
our movies are entirely different Deborah Knight says ‘Satisfaction is guaranteed
with genre; the deferral of the inevitable provides the additional pleasure of
prolonged anticipation’. By keeping to the conventions of the genre in my
poster satisfaction is guaranteed from the start for my audiences.

9. This particular poster was extremely interesting in my research as this is a
low budget science fiction movie. Here we can see again simplistic text, a
tag line and most importantly to me the focus on one character. For this
reason I saw that in my images my simplistic approach was acceptable.
Taglines also seemed to play a key role in science fiction, the title flanked
closely by them. For this reason I will make sure my poster utilises a tagline
uses these.

10. What have I learnt?
• 1) Simplistic imagery has precedent.
• 2) Posters can be focussed on just one character.
• 3) Taglines are essential.
• 4) Genre conventions must be met to ensure audience satisfaction.
• 5) Reception theory will play a key role- as I need to encode my poster
with the right image for audiences to view my movie.