Film Posters History

What is a Film Poster?

A Film poster, is a poster that has been created in order to advertise a film. This method of advertisement broadens the horizons for the amount of people who will see the advertisement for the film. This means that the amount of people who will potentially view the film, will increase.
In this day, a variation of film posters displaying different images, and different texts are printed out. This is because if people see a variation of images from a film this may incite them more, into engaging in the film.
A film poster will generally contain an image with some text, the image used on the film poster is usually of the protagonist (as they are usually the bankable, A-List star). However, prior to the 1990's, illustrations were more commonly used than photos.
Gordon Gorey stated that posters - a transition from "sound-orientated beings to primarily visually-orientated"

History

The covers of film posters didn't contain any stars, this is because the actors felt embarrassed participating in this 'new' industry and so decided to remain anonymous. Producers were thrilled with this outcome as it meant that they had complete control of this medium, as long as there were not any stars.

1910 saw the demand in the public wanting to know the names of the nameless actors. The producing companies realised that they could make money out of the 'movie stars' and so, this sparked a change which meant that now, actors names were published on film posters.

The 1920's were considered the golden age of the silent movie. Beautiful locations took the place of the cinema. Well known artists were bought in to design portraits and movie posters of the protagonists.

The film industry really became its own in the 1930's. Not only did the 'Great Depression' happen, where people believed that the cinema wouldn't be as popular due to tight restrictions on money, but the Great Depression saw an increase into the number of people who went to the cinema, because they wanted to escape reality.

With the 1940's came the development of the television. Due to this new creation a number of people who use to attended the cinema replaced it with the TV, as a result, the movie companies reduced the amount of films they created. This meant that a lot of actors and actresses were out of the job which proved a devastating blow for them.

In order for fight the popularity of television, in the 1950's movie companies created more fantasy films. The ever popular 'war' genre was now replaced with other genres, such as, science-fiction, comedy and 'B' drive in movies. Although drive-in movies had been around since 1933 it reached its peak in popularity during the 1950's with over 4,000 screens in the United Sates alone.

The 1960's bought the boomer generation to their teen years. Since there were so many children from the post-war baby boom a majority of the films were teen orientated. Rock and roll artists such as Elvis Presley entered into the light of stardom, not only for his music but for his involvement within movies. Action films became increasingly popular during this time as we saw the introduction of the infamous double agent, James Bond 007.

The 1970's was a launching pad to the era of the blockbusters the 1980's. Movies such as, The Godfather, Star Wars, Rock and Star Trek were born. Posters of this time did use photography but there was the occasional use of drawing and painting created by famous artists like Ansel Adams, Frank Frazetta and Bob Peak created some popular posters of this time.

Special effects belonged to the age of the 1980's, this was the key to the success of films such as, Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The 1990's welcomed computerisation of special effects, which bought two of the largest money making films in history, Jurassic Park and Batman Forever.


Finally, the earliest forms of advertising for movies included hand painted crates and sandwich boards. The turn of the 20th Century saw a world with a very high illiteracy rate. Posters or advertising for any entertainment needed to have vibrant colours and pictures and a limited amount of words, so that the advertising could be appreciated by a large number of people.

Types of Posters

There are different types of advertising film posters, for example:

Teaser Poster

This type of poster is a poster is released early, as a promotional one. The content of the poster is very basic, this is so that not too much information about the plot, theme and characters are not revealed. The purpose of a teaser poster is self explanatory, the poster is released in order to inticte and create and awareness for an up and coming film.






Character Poster

This type of poster is self explanatory. It is a poster that reveals the different characters within that film.
On the poster, there will be the name of the actor, the characters name.