Researching and Designing a Film Noir poster

Every film is released with a poster to promote, spread the word and build up the excitement before the film release. The posters released alongside Film Noir's were often hand drawn due to the fact that in the 1950's computers were not often used for graphic design.

One of the main conventions of a Film Noir poster was to include a female femme fatale as the main feature. This is used to show that male gaze theory was involved heavily within Film Noir. I have used this convention in the design of my own poster in order to make it as authentic as possible.

Another convention of Film Noir posters is the colours that are used on the posters. Commonly, Black, White and Red are the three staple colours used as these three colours represent passion, lust, danger and romance. All of these are themes within Film Noir.

Here are some examples of Film Noir posters:

By comparing ideas from other posters, I worked on several designs before settling with this one as my final product.

  For the poster I used the character profile shot of Emilie as the main point of focus, the reason being, that she plays the role of the Femme Fatale and is therefore one of the most crucial characters in the film. Using Photoshop, I subtly blurred the photo of Emilie to add a sense of mystery, before air brushing the necklace so that it stood out. This was because of the role that the necklace plays in the plot. I wanted to highlight how important it was. I then inserted a completely black background as a canvas to add text. After putting the actors names along the top in a bold white text, I then created a red and white coloured title font placed towards the top of the poster. After adding the RELM logo, I decided to include a tag line at the bottom to get readers questioning the plot of the film and to get them hooked into watching it.