Practical: Making the Billing's Block for the Poster

In addition to creating a teaser trailer for our chosen genre, it was necessary for our group to create a promotion film poster which conformed to common conventions. My task in this process was to create the Billings Block and production company logos to be placed in the bottom third of the poster. This post details the steps that I carried out in order to produce these.

Research:

In order to produce an appropriate Billings block for a film poster of our genre, I carried out some research, attached below.



Film Poster for "Smiley", a 2012 Slasher Horror

Film Poster for "Mirrors", a 2008 Mystery Horror


 

Example of Billings Block from "Gravity" Film Poster

 From my Research, I concluded that Billings Blocks are often faded or blended into the poster itself slightly in order to refrain from attracting the audience's attention first. The chosen fonts are often elongated, making the text look stretched out and difficult to read; this is to also prevent drawing the audience's attention whilst still being recognisable. Finally, they are always positioned at the bottom of the poster, often in a faded white font; the use of white will also conform to common conventions of our chosen genre as commonly, the colours red, black and white are used to depict horror and gore.

Creating the Billings Block:

Firstly, I typed out the different names that I wanted to use in a Microsoft Word Document, using the font 'Calibri', as this looked most like the examples investigated. I then centralised the text and made the whole block size 9 to accurately represent common examples. Once this was completed, I then manipulated the size of the job roles, such as 'Producer' or 'Director' so that they were of a smaller size, accentuating the names of the lead stars and conforming to common conventions of Billings Blocks; in order to understand the examples of job roles explored, I looked closely at the 'Saw' film poster, as this film is of a similar genre to our own piece.

This image shows the exported Billings Block .JPEG file

I then copied and imported the text box into a paint document in order to manipulate the text and elongate the font, as shown in my research above. To do this, I simply pulled the text box size downwards to elongate the font. Using the Paint software also enabled me to remove the background of the image to make the implementation onto the film poster much easier. Once this process was completed, I exported the image as a .JPEG ready for use on the film poster.

 Making the 'Featuring' Names:

 I then created titles for the poster which featured the names of the stars featuring in our trailer; this process was carried out in the same manner as I created the Billings Block, explored above. However, after further research into film posters of the horror genre, we discovered that many of the actors which feature in the films are not displayed on the film poster aside from in the Billings Block, particularly as many directors choose to use infamous names to promote the sense of realism in the film. For this reason, we later changed the names to 'From the Directors of...' as this was a much more common convention of horror film posters. 

Creating the Production Company Logos:

Since the logos for the production companies and associations that we used in our trailer rarely change, we decided to use examples that were implemented onto an existing film poster. Due to this argument, I decided to use the logos from the 'Saw' film poster, as the examples used for this type of genre were similar to that of our trailer.

 Firstly, I imported the film poster into paint and cropped the file to just show the logos found at the bottom of the poster. I then cropped this image further to show the 3 companies which I wanted to feature and saved these images as 3 separate .JPEG images.


This image shows the 3 exported .JPEG files for the companies which will feature on our film poster

The following image shows the completed Film Poster with the Billings Block and Company Logos positioned at the bottom:

Evaluation:

Overall, I feel that I created a successful and appropriate Billings Block for our chosen genre and trailer narrative. I feel that I was able to manipulate text and images well in order to produce the task as desired, as well as experimenting with different software in addition to just Photoshop and Final Cut. Once the images exported are implemented into the film poster, I believe that our promotional film poster will be both professional looking and conform to common conventions.