The Poster for a film is a very important advertising tool. It could be the first introduction the audience recieve to the film. we find film posters on road billboards or at bus stops. 
A film Trailer will give a better overall view of the film, but people are far more likely to see a film poster. In effect the film poster is used to entice people into going one step further and researching the film i.e. by searching for details of it online and by looking for the trailer (if it has one). The film Poster creates awerness of the film, it should also have elemets of appeal to it, if the poster looks unexciting or 'dull' people won't think anything of it, the first obvous thing is a poster need to be eye catching.
Posters are used to give poeple hints as to the contect of the film, it also hylights the actors and director. this should give people a better idea of if they want to see the film, for example, if their favourite direcor or actor is part of the film. Other elements within the poster hylight important aspects of the film such as it's genera, this can be see though the visula contect, ie if it contains explosions ans guns in the poster it is likely an action film as opposed to if it contains a man and a woman about to kiss or hugging then it is more liely to be a romantic film.
Other things come into play, such as the lighting and colour of the poster, posters with a darker backround and less contrast are more likely to be horror as apposed to a brightly coloured disney film. Bright colours and more light reveals that the mood of the film will be more comedy of family based.
Many posters are also often steriotypes (unless they are comdey who often play upon subverted steriotypes). The steriotypical dress of a character reveals the nature of what thier role will be winin the film so for example a man wearing boxing gloves suggest he will be fighting. The directors often have characters within the film who they want to be kept a secret untill the films releace, these charactes are often towards the back pulling no obvious pose.
The facial exressions,'pose' and position of characters winthin a poster also give some idea of the hyerachy within the film, who plays more dominet roles/less dominent.
__CheaperByTheDozen2(1)%5B1%5D.jpg)
Finally film posters have writing on them, this reveals things like the distribution company, the director, the website and leading role within the film, actors, the director, the producer, sometimes the writer or the score maker and often the release date. Usually this infomration will appear in an ultra thin condensed form at the bottom of the poster and on the back of Dvd's it is usually almost identical to the first few credits you see at the end of the film. often this information will be a grey colour and although it is very 'squashed' it can still be read. very usefull for poster editors to cram all the relevent information into a poster.
Our Film Duplicate is a science fiction film so natrually i have decided to analyse a scienfiction films poster:
In this Poster we can se it has a very 'metal' look to it often a lot of science fiction films have content in them such as advanced machinery uin this case the transformers although more steriotypical science fiction films are set in space and therefore have the black and silver colour scheeme. they also tent to have a lot of blue as part of the make up of the metallic look to it. Our film in it's self will have a blue tinge to it throguhout, this is done dileberatly to create this metallic feel. We can see that the poster hylights key elemts within the film, the imiage of earth in space and the transformers reavelas it's science fiction content, the main characters are the robots, but also the shia labeouf playing the main character has a centered postion in the poster showing his dominence over the other people and again the transformers above him showing their dominence, it all reveals the hyerichy. At the bottom of the poster we can see the ultra thin writing which reveals the releace date and the main people within the films, the key actors, the director. At the bottom although you cannot see it very well it has a website with more infomation about the film and also the distribution campany, in this case paramount. The punch line at the top 'their war, our world' reveals even more of the film what content the audience may expect from the film. we can see it has little contrast pulling out the key blue, black and silver eliments revealing it to be a science fiction film, it also hylights the orange tinge that you would expect from an action film poster.
other examples of sciecne fiction film posters:
-picture-MOV_df03d8f4_b%5B1%5D.jpg)
