Poster Design for Filmmakers: Create a Poster for your Short Film

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. My name is Vera Martinez and I'm a filmmaker from Mexico City. As a low budget filmmaker, I've had to find out how to create stuff related to my projects all by myself, such as creating the posters for my short films. In this class, I will teach you how to make a simple but effective poster to promote your short or feature length films. I'll show you how you can discover the best way to portray the essence of your film through your poster and how to find the best image for it. I'll give you a few options so you can choose the one that's easiest and most efficient to you. I will create two different posters along with you to exemplify the whole process. This is a beginner's level class. It's aimed at filmmakers or aspiring filmmakers who are no experts in graphic design, but who still need to create posters to promote their film projects. These class can really help you out if you need to create a poster for film festivals, exhibitions, or social media. See you in class. 2. Brainstorming: Hello everyone. I'm really glad you decided to join the class. A film poster, as we know, serves the purpose of announcing and promoting a film. The poster style generally depends on what type of film it is. For example, if it's commercial film or if it's a more to artistic one and of course the genre. Comedy poster is going to be really different from a terror movie poster. The poster main purpose besides promoting and announcing a film is to guess the eye of the viewer, portraying the essence of the film or the style of the film. You will know what type of film also telling you important information about the film, like the directors or producer's name, the actors if the movie has been in any film festivals. Before we start creating our posters, I want you to ask yourself a few questions regarding your film. Write your answers down in keywords rather than long sentence answers. You can write them down in a notebook or in a post-it note if you want. What are the themes of your film? What genre is your film? Is your film more about the characters or the story? What is the main purpose of your poster? What do you want to provoke with your poster? By these, I mean, what sentiment or what feeling you want to provoke. For example, I'll give you my answers regarding my last project, which is the one that I will be creating the two posters to. It's a short film called The castanet and the toad. The main three teams of my short film, I would say our solitude, friendship, and femininity. I would say it's a drama, fiction-drama, short film. My short is really about the characters more than the plot. The main purpose of the poster is to promote my short in film festivals. The sentiment I want to provoke with my poster is melancholia. These are the keywords for my exercise. I previously made this poster which I really like. It's really simple and I feel it conveys my keywords quite well. It expresses what I wanted to express. My short film has two main characters, as you can see. I want to create each character a new poster since I already have a poster with both of them in it. As you can see, these keywords will really help us out regarding the choices we make while creating our posters. I feel it's really important to have these reflection exercise prior to creating our poster. We can have something to start working with. 3. Find your Image: I've found that the two best and easiest sources to find an image for your film are either getting a still from the finished film or using a photograph from the making off. First, with the process of extracting the stills. Perhaps you already have in mind a scene where you can extract the still from, you can choose a still that is really interesting, that is really eye-catching, or representative of your film. I'm going to show you how to extract the still from a video with Photoshop. You open Photoshop, we go to file, import video to layers. I recommend limiting to two frames to have the least possible frames as well as limiting only this section of the video where the still you want is. The fewer frames you select, the faster the process. I'm removing all the layers that are stills that I do not want, until I get to visualize the frames that interest me, I choose one. I leave only the layer of the frame that I want to export. I go to image adjustments, cut. I had to cut my image only because the format of my short film is 4:3, and I want to cut out the black borders. Then we will export and save for web. We see that everything is in order and we export in high resolution JPEG, and choose the destination of your file. Now, to extract this still with Final Cut is much simpler than with Photoshop. We open a new project, we import the scene from where you want to take your still, select the moment that is the best for you, which will be the image for your poster. We put the selection line on the frame that we want, we go to the export section, and select the option, save current frame. If you do not have this option, you have to enable it in the preferences section of the program. We prepare to export, which is the type of file we want. It can be JPEG or PNG, either of which is fine. We decided the destination of the file and that's it. Now for the photographs from the making off, if you had the luck to have a friend to help you out taking pictures behind the scenes, and after making off, I would really recommend you looking into those pictures. I've looked inside the folders of the photos a friend took during the shoot of my shot. I was very lucky that he took many photos of the actors on the set, which serve very well for this purpose. Actually the photo from my first poster is a photo from the making off, which turned out perfect for it. If you happen to have a friend to help you take some photographs during your shoot, just look into those photographs, I'm sure you can find some photo that works. Always look for the potential in the image. Remember, you are going to edit the photograph, and you're also going to text and everything else. You can also have the option to create the image yourself specifically for your poster, and you might be recreating some scenes from your shot or film, or maybe by just your actors modeling to you for you to take photographs of them. The options are endless. You can do really whatever you want. But I'm recommending you these two options because they are the most efficient, less time consuming because you already have all of the things that you need. 4. Formats and Tools: The traditional, and probably the most used poster format, is 27 by 40 inches, which is a portrait format. This is a format that I'm going to be using for both of the posters I'll be making in this class, but you can really change the dimensions to whatever your needs or preferences are. If you want a more horizontal poster, a more squared one, it's okay. Now for the tools that you can use. For photo retouching, the programs that I use the most are Photoshop and Lightroom. However, Lightroom seems much better to me to edit photographs. It is simpler and more intuitive. Photoshop, I only recommend it more for complex image editing. If you do not have any of these two programs, you can use a free app on your phone to edit the photo you have chosen. You can make a great photo edition with a mobile app. I think there's a mobile app for Lightroom that is very good, I recommend you look for one that works for you. For the layout, I highly recommend this web app called Canva. It has a very good free version and very useful to do many things related to graphic design. In fact, they have several templates that you can use to make a movie poster. Likewise, for layout, I use Photoshop almost always. It is much more practical to make all your poster in a single program, but it is a bit more complicated to use. You can also use any image or text processors such as Keynote, PowerPoint, even Pages, or Word. If you do not have any other program you can surely import the image that you have edited, and add text in these programs. I'm creating both posters in different platforms, just to show you different ways you can create a poster, and both can really look nice and professional, and one is with a more complex tool, and the other one is free, and easier to use. I want to compare both of the options, so you can choose whatever you prefer. 5. Editing the Image: Now for the image editing, you can go really into many different directions depending on what you need. I personally would recommend going very simple with your editing in case your not expert. But you also have to think of what the style of your film is, because for example, my short film is really realistic and naturalistic so I want my poster to have the same look. That's why my image retouching choices will be for me to move forward that direction. Like I wanted to emulate the image style that my short film already has. How to edit your image. I recollected a few examples of movie posters for some common genres like comedy, drama and action. As you can see, although the posters are different from each other, they all have a lot of similarities inside each genre. That's why it can be very inspiring and useful to look into some film posters that are similar to yours in case you're lost and then nowhere to start. The image for the first poster, we're going to edit in Lightroom. As I already told you, it is a program that I like the most to edit photos. Here, what I am going to do is quite simple retouching. As it is still that I extracted from my short film it already has the general look that I want for the poster. I am only highlighting certain characteristics of the image. For example, if this were photograph taking in the making of and notice still, it would take me a lot more to edit the photo, trying to emulate the look at my short film has. But here, the necessary editing is quite simple. I only highlight certain colors that I want to stand out more, which in this case are the pink tones. But I could really make the poster without retouching the image at all. This doesn't mean that if you use this tool, you cannot touch it. Remember that everything depends on the style that you want. Now, the second poster, it's going to be made entirely in Photoshop, including the editing of the image. The first thing is to import the photo to Photoshop and choose reframe it based on the dimensions of 27 by 4 inches. You have to try to make the composition as good as possible. Follow your instinct and see how the position of the image works best. From this moment, think about where the text with the title could go. For example, I liked it here, so these will be my frame. I'm going to start retouching the image. As you saw, I went from one window to another because I have a still of my short film in the same location where the photo was taken for reference. Which helps me to compare it during the editing process. Since I want to go from the saturated look that the JPEG photo has to the look of the color correction that my shot has. Then I play with the brightness, the contrast, the colors. I do what what I see that looks best. In my case, I have an image as a reference, but you can have another poster or any source of inspiration as a reference depending on whether you want your poster to be very contrasted, without contrast. If you want to superimpose images, to saturate the image, saturated it whatever you want. What I want, as I said before, is a realistic retouched with light pale colors, which is also a relatively simple retouching. In this case, the photo I choose is a photo of the main actress of my short who was sitting in the set and is just very much in the character. I thought the photo was pretty good. I liked it a lot because it expresses the essence of the character. It is perfect for a poster to represent her. 6. Text and Layout: The font and color you choose for the text. It's really important and try to go with a font that goes well with the style of your poster according to what we talked before. For example, if your film is a horror film or an action film, I would really go for a bold heavy font. But in case it's a more realistic drama, I would go with the simpler font. Even an inspiration. I love going into Google Fonts. It's a website where you can look into a bunch of different fonts and they will give you the history of each font. What I really like is that they also give you font combinations, for non graphic designer like myself, that it's really useful just to see which fonts go well with other fonts. For more inspiration and also for downloading free fonts, I recommend dafont.com. It's a website where you can download free to use fonts. You can also really get inspired with all of the font options that they have. The color I would choose according to the color palette of your poster. But also it could be regarding the general color palette of your film. Now for the layout, I really use my instinct and work depending on what photograph I'm working with. I recommend you looking into film posters that are the same genres yours, to get some inspiration. What types of fonts do they use? Where did they place a text? How did they distribute it? Try to emulate that. I personally like to be [inaudible] said before, I like simple text and not to be on the poster. My layout consists primarily on my photograph. I only had the title and my name. However, you could add anything you like, like the actor's name, all of the producer info, the production info at the bottom of the poster in bold letters like in Hollywood posters. Even any awards your film has received at the top or whatever you want. Now for the layout, the first poster I'm going to edit in Canva. Canva asks you what type of graphic you want to design. I'd write that I want to design a movie poster and it gives me templates and examples of posters automatically. In Canva, they also used a 27 by 40 format for the posters. You only have to select the type of graphic and start working on it. We import the already retouched image that we already have and we frame it as we did with the other one. I decided on my framing and started writing the title of my short film. I put the font, I wanted. That is the one I have been using all the time. I started experimenting with the size and color. I add a short film by better [FOREIGN]. Those are the only text boxes that I will have my poster. Now it is to see how they look better together. I was experimenting with arranging texts in several ways until I got something I liked. I finally decided to put the title on the side with my name below in smaller letters. I do not like for my name to look so big. As for the colors, I decided the color white because it goes well with the color palette. And it is a color that differs Well from the background. My name, I put it in a pinkish color that goes with the same palette, it's pink very similar to the tile of the bathroom. The final poster looked like this. For the second poster, it's basically the same, but in Photoshop, it's a bit less intuitive, but still simple. You add text boxes, choose the color, sizes, and arranging them. I wrote the title of my short film and started to move it around to see where it look best. I feel that there was enough space above for the title without invading the space of my characters, so that was perfect. Here I use the color red, which is a color that I used in both titles and credits for my shot. But in the end I decided to change it to a pink colored so that it was more delicate and harmonies with the color palette of the photograph. I also added my name and for the color I tried to get some color that was already in the same image. I ended up using a bluish-gray. In these two posters. I looked for more harmony that contrast in terms of color. This is how my final poster looked like. 7. Export and Final Thoughts: The final step is exporting your file and you're ready to go. To export in Canva is quite simple. When you finish the poster press the icon above where there is the option to download and select the file we want. Choose the type of file, either JPEG or PNG, and choose the location of the file. Also in Photoshop, we save for web and select JPEG in high resolution. Check that the dimensions are correct. Select the location of the file, and that's it. Remember that in case you need to print your posters, you have to be cautious with your dimensions, the printing formats, and colors. I am not going to dig into that because I don't think I'm qualified, but I'm sure you can find some answers online. That's it. You're good to go. I really hope this class was useful and that you will share your posters with me and the other students in the project panel section below. I've recommended attaching a synopsis of your film to your projects so we can get a broader perspective on your poster creation. If you don't have a film to make a poster to just make an alternative poster to your favorite film. Thank you so much for watching this class. If you liked it, please share it with someone you think will like as well. I would really appreciate if you reviewed my class and give me some feedback. My name is Bárbara Martínez and I invite you to follow my channel for more film related classes. See you in the next class.