Chosen Picture for the Poster

This is the picture we have chosen for our Poster. We chose this particular picture instead of the other shots we took as all the boys were looking directly at the camera. We chose to take this picture as a mid-shot as the background detail remains minimal as the location will be established later in the trailer/film. We also chose to take it as an eye-level shot as it shows the subjects as we would expect to see them in real life and is a fairly neutral shot. When I was taking these pictures i referred back to a previous blog i had done on 'The Gaze', I did this because the stance and engagement of the characters is essential, especially for  film poster. We chose to use a direct address this is where 'the gaze of a person (animal or object) shown in the text looking ‘out of the frame’ as if at the person watching the film or reading the magazine'. My reasoning behind this is because it makes the characters appear looming and sinister, this conforms to the typical gangster conventions and stereotype.  The stance and positioning of our characters was very important as we wanted to show the authority within the group. We  made sure we had 5 boys when it came to filming as the positioning and symmetry was important when it came to group shots during filming and especially pictures. In my opinion a poster with a group/gang on the front is more appealing when it is symmetrical grasping more attention. We obviously had the boss, Tony 'Don' Milano, at the front in the middle and his men around him to show that they worked for him, this is similar to the GoodFellas film poster.  

 We chose this specific location as we wanted our picture to appear as a facade, juxtaposing the men in smart suits with typical estate in the background which follows the conventions of the usual meeting places for gangsters. Although we didn't want to capture a lot of the background, as we didn't want the focus of the background to challenge the focus of our characters, we were aware that the background did play an important role. We chose to use natural lighting as it made the picture look quite gloomy which we thought worked well, we thought about using a spotlight but didn't think it would give us the effect we were aiming for. To make sure we didn't want to use additional lighting I used the fill flash on my camera to compare with the natural lighting to ensure we were making the correct choice. After comparing the two pictures we remained with our initial decision as the fill flash made the picture too bright which didn't correspond to our theme as well.

  Finally we chose to take away the colour and use black and white. I did this on photoshop by removing the colour and adjusted the input levels so the picture appeared more sharp and all minor details were visible. As we want to limit our colour palette when it comes to creating our poster and magazine cover, we feel that having our poster in black and white will be more effective. Although this seems a little bland we plan to add a tag line to our poster which will make it eye-catching.

Before:

 

After: