Planning and Initial Ideas for the Short Film's Poster

As mentioned earlier my target audience would be 15-25 year olds of all genders and races; however the audience can range due to the theme of humanity and society promoting peace between people that is relevant to everyone in all societies. My target audience is the youth and young adults because the younger a person is the easier it is to shape and influence their minds, teach a child to do something when their young and they will do it through adulthood, if this message is received by the audience they too will promote harmony and peace and eventually actually creating a good impact on humanity or even just their local society.

I will try to incorporate the theme of different cultures and peace by possibly including a shot of the two main characters, the westerner and easterner possibly standing next to each other friendly maybe leaning on a shoulder, the large images of the two characters would also attract eastern cultured audiences as well as westerners too see this film of social unity. Or I could work from the opposite angle and suggest difference and strife between the two characters and essentially cultures, this could be done by characters turned away from each other and maybe one character can be staring at the other character with a mean look behind his back. I could also try to separate the characters using semiotics in symbolic codes by using contrasting colours in the background that could clearly or fade in the centre suggesting two different sides, maybe a few smaller montages of stereotypical and noticeable images resembling the two different cultures. I would include symbols of religion or countries such as flags and a tagline that suggest to the audience separation and difference.

I could also include an image of the location of the film for example have a backdrop of central London towering over the characters, this would directly indicate a target audience of people that live in the city of London, and as London is a very culturally diverse city the audience will vary from age to race, in this case I do not believe gender is very important.

From my previous research into film posters I noticed many had taglines that indicated the plot or theme of the film, it gives the audience a little insight to the film and keeps them wondering, for example in the ‘Clockwork Orange’ pretty much the whole of the film is summed up nicely by the tagline being ‘Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven’. Similarly I can sum up my film of the differences of the cultures and maybe imply through the written codes of semiotics that the cultures are trying to get along overall suggesting the events of the film without revealing much to the audience keeping them in suspense. Example like this can include:

‘Two races, two religions, is there a compromise?’

In this tagline I have used semiotics for the audience to infer that there is some sort of problem or situation that must be solved that consists between the two races and religions. This tagline has a clear indication of the two cultures suggesting a comparison between the two. However this tagline does not impose peace and unity which is my intended idea and may not be the best approach to a multicultural film that has the potential to reach various types of religions and race. I have also noticed that some taglines use literary devices such as the power of three, where things work best in groups of three, in this case the tagline consists of 3 parts separated by pauses in the attempt to create an easy tagline that the audience can easily remember that will summarize the film:

‘What’s the difference between people in the east and west? No difference’

In this different approach I have suggested a clear indication of unity between cultures imposing the right message upon the audience, in this tagline the plot or events of the film aren’t revealed and in this case the tagline for the film could be anything that involved two different races.
For a final approach, I could try and stay away from both positive and negative sounding taglines and let the audience infer their own opinions from the tagline. Approaching it from a neutral perspective I could just infer that there is a difference between these two people but the tagline would not reveal what this difference could be, also this tagline could be considered slightly comical to all cultures. This could consist of images relating to the different religions such as the Quran and the Bible and have our two main characters in the foreground with the tagline underneath reading:

‘Spot the difference’