SAW Franchise - Inspiration

Saw was a film in which inspired us for our poster ideas, we wanted the main focus to be on the image, as sometimes the text on some posters can be too predominant and take away the main focus and that being the image.

Here are some examples of Saw posters where there is not much text and the overall focus is the image.

The images are really gritty. Lots of questions arise as to how these people have got themselves into the situations. The saturation of the film is also to a grey scale, which is not usual for posters as they normally have a red theme to tie in with the blood used in the movie.

I think this is important as the focus is the image, although SAW is part of a franchise so people can see one of the images and automatically relate it to the previous films. Although we are not part of a franchise, it gives the film a mysterious look and people will want to see it.

Films like ‘Drag Me to Hell’ have the director on the poster to show that it must be a good film to see as they have a good director. Sam Raimi is featured on the poster for ‘Drag me to Hell’, as he is a well respected director and has made films such as ‘Spiderman’. This was not important for Dark Room Productions as the poster alone would attract many young horror fans to want to see it.

Some other posters which also have the same use of using a little texts is ‘Trick r Treat’ , ‘The last Exorcism’ and ‘The eye’. All these posters have a lot of copy space but this has not been used. I think these posters are more affective as they focus more on the image and less on the actual text. When looking at a film poster, the majority of people are drawn to the image and focus on the image used and what is happening. The credits used are not normally looked at and observed, where people have a more pictorial way of thinking they will remember the image and not what the actual text says.

One poster ‘Wolfman’ is extremely effective as it only has the title on the poster. It doesn’t have the date or any credits. This is effectual as the image stands out and it is very memorable, people rely more on the internet now to tell them when the film comes out and they would have to go on the internet to check out the times of the film anyway, so the use of using a very strong image and just the title is something which we have decided to follow too.

Here is another example of the image being really effective and making the audience think about what will happen in the film. in this poster ‘Ruins’ the image is off a group of teenagers in a group, and alike the conventions of most films, the group of teenagers die one by one.

‘Prom Night’ also has the ‘stereotypical’ convention of again a group of teenagers and they die. Although film goers can easily guess the plot, with not much text being on the poster it leaves more to the imagination.