Researching Film Noir posters

 For every Film Noir there would be a movie poster created. So before I created the poster for our film, I decided to research and look at a few posters from Film/Neo Noirs that I have watched either in class or in my own time.

 The three film posters I decided to study and look at were 'Brick', 'Double Indemnity' and 'The Big Heat'. These three films are ones I've watched and studied so I thought it would make sense to take a look at the posters that were created for the films. 'Double Indemnity' and 'The Big Heat' are fairly similar as in the structure of the poster and the male is the dominant force in both posters. For example in Double Indemnity the male is seen in control, as he's towering over the lady and is seen with a weapon. And in The Big Heat, the male seems to have power over the woman as he is grasping her wrist. Both characters, male and female are seen to be smartly dressed. Both males wearing a suit and women wearing elegant dresses. Even though the colour of the two dresses are different, this could be a sign of what the character is like in the film. The yellow dress almost suggests a mysterious and neutral role and the red dress is a sign of a typical femme fatale character in a film noir.

 Comparing these two posters to Brick we can see an obvious difference. One being that Brick has used digital imagery to create the poster, mainly because technology is more advanced. But a similar property of the film noir posters compared to the neo noir poster is that all of the posters introduce the main characters in some way or another. The text in all three posters is fairly similar apart from the location of the text. The title of the film is quite bold and central in all three posters and the colours used are strong and stand out. The actors names in Double Indemnity and The Big Heat are clearly written at the top and bottom of both posters, whereas in the film poster for Brick, we are only introduced to the character's names in the film.

When It comes to creating my own poster I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS5, and I will use photo's that me and my group have taken in the studio at school on the poster. For the title, I will make sure it is bold and try to stick to a colour which contrasts well with the background, doing this will make it stand out even more and gain the viewers attention. I may also include a critics review of the film from my audience feedback, doing this will show real thoughts of the film, and also be typical of a film noir poster.