I wanted to start off with the style that was carried throughout all of the examples I researched into - the plain background and eye catching characters style.
In order to begin I looked through the pictures we took of our actors on the day of our table read and chose the ones I thought worked the best. The characters that should be on the posters, in my own opinion, are Dean, Annie, Marie & Betty as they are all recurring characters within the series (especially Annie & Dean). I chose one picture of Marie and one of Betty that showed their characters personality clearly, and I found three different pictures of Annie and Dean that do the same thing.
I started off by deleting the background of each picture and adding the character into a separate canvas, which will act as our poster canvas. I proceeded to do this for all the pictures I wanted to use within the poster. I then postponed each character into a position that I thought would work well for the TV series. Annie & Dean are in the foreground, while Marie and Betty are in the background.
This composition gives the audience a clear idea as to who the two main characters are within the show, but also it gives off the impression that both Marie and Betty are important within the shows narrative. Marie's face shows an annoyed emotion which indicates her relationship between the two main characters. In comparison, Betty's face shows a flirty, nosey expression which indicates her role and personality within the show.
In the show, Betty introduces her 'pet' to the audience. Her robotic cat Arnold is basically seen as Betty's sidekick so I thought it would be a nice and humorous touch to add him into the poster.
The three different images I found of Annie & Dean all work really well in the poster, but in terms of facial expression they all tell a different story/emotion. I've placed all three images into the photoshop file, and they are all in the right position, so as the weeks go by I can see which works better.
I'm going to be showing this poster design to the others as well, to see what their opinions are, so they can also give me their opinions on the different Annie & Dean pictures.
After getting the images in place I added the title of our show and the logo of our production company.
I made sure, much like the posters in my research, that the title was clearly presented on the poster, and big enough so audience members can see it from a far. The colours in the title as well are eye-catching which makes the poster stand out, which in turn gets peoples attention which is our main aim. I didn't want the production company logo to be very loud and large compared to the title, so I made sure to keep it small and in the corner. That way, the audience can still see the production company, but they are mainly attracted to the title of the show and the characters in it.
When looking at this poster, I thought it still looked pretty boring and it needed some sort of background to keep the energy up.
I had many ideas as to what the background could be, one of them was the same living room background that is seen in the title sequence of the show.
I thought this would link the two together in an effective way, but upon placing it in the background I decided it didn't work as well as I would've hoped. The colours don't look very eye-catching for a poster, and it's too busy meaning the audience may be more attracted to whats going on in the background than the main part of the poster.
Instead, I went back to my research and decided to experiment with a plain, bright colour. I tried a few different bright colours like yellow, orange, green and blue. I asked my groups opinion and we all decided the orange worked nicely, as it gave the poster a boost of energy and added to the eye-catching effective. The plain orange, however, was a little too plain and I thought it needed some depth, shadowing or gradient to give it a little bit more design.
I started with the gradient, and I composed the lightness of the gradient in the centre of the image, so the darkness of the orange can be seen around the edge. This gave the colour a lot more depth, but it was still lacking something around the edge of the poster. I looked within the layer style of the photo and found an 'inner shadow' effect. I experimented with a dark colour orange, the blend mode - which was set to 'Multiply' - and the opacity to get the result I wanted.
When placing the other elements of the poster against the orange background, I found that all elements were eye-catching and the the background wasn't too distracting for the audience. The colour works with the characters outfits, the colour of the title and it gives the show a bright, fun, tone which was the desire of the poster.
Overall, I'm really happy with the outcome of this poster, and I think every element of it works well and is really effective when standing out against the crowd. It's clear that it resembles a lot of the research I had previously done, meaning it looks like a real TV sitcom poster. I am going to experiment with a few other different poster designs if I get the time, but if they don't work out this will be the one we go with. I still need to add a few lines of text, but that can be done later in the process.
I'm glad that I concluded the research I did, as it has helped me with the outcome of our own poster.
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