Ancillary Task: Promotional Poster

Throughout the planning of our promotional poster we knew that the typeface and colours we employed needed to reflect the content of the film itself. Because the film revolves around the guidebook from which the film takes its name, we chose to use a font that looked as if it had come from a typewriter, looking strikingly similar to that on the front of the guide in the film. We chose a white background to fit with the white paper the guide is made up of.

Before this we created a draft version on a black background. The result was disappointing, with the dark background misrepresenting the themes of the film, leaning more towards an aesthetic associated with horror films. The result was our choice to opt for a white version.


We have included the production company name, "Clandestine Pictures", on the poster as well as a tagline of "from the producers of Regent House". We chose to do this as these are common features on promotional posters for films, drawing in an audience who may already have heard of the company or earlier films they produced with the credibility they provide.

The photograph was selected from a series of 60 different images, shot in RAW rather than JPEG so as to capture the full spectrum of image data. The colour levels were edited with an image converter, and once they were to our taste, were then converted to JPEG make editing easier: RAW is a large filesize and can sometimes make software sluggish when editing. The poster itself was arranged using GIMP. Because we wanted a relatively simple poster we felt the need to keep the software simple: GIMP was perfect for this, being more streamlined and user friendly than other software packages such as Adobe PhotoShop.

by Joseph Lawrence, Peter McLaughlin, Tim McNiven and Oliver Fitch