Ancillary Task (poster series) - Research

When a new film is released, particularly a hollywood blockbuster that is part of a franchise, the distribution company will often release a series of posters rather than just one. This is true of the recent release The Twilight Saga: New Moon.
Usually, when a company releases more than one promotional poster, there is one main poster which is used most often (shown above, the poster that is largest) and then several posters alongside it. These extra posters usually focus on one character, or show different aspects of the narrative of the film.

(pictured left: Alice Cullen)
This poster focuses on a character who isn't seen as a main character. The yellow car featured in the poster provides exposition to part of the narrative in the film, where Alice steals a yellow porsche in order to race through the Italian town. It also shows several images laid over each other to establish a link between events throughout the narrative (in this case; Alice, Alice's vision of Bella jumping of the cliff, and the car Alice steals).



Other franchises include several versions of the teaser poster, portraying different aspects of the plot or suggesting a different theme in the film. For example, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight , released several teaser posters in the run up to release of the film.


Many of these posters feature the main characters, although only two show the faces. In one of the posters, no character is shown at all, with only the Joker's face drawn on a blank jail cell wall, modified to include the bat shape, providing anchorage of the film. In my teaser poster I didn't include my characters, instead focusing on one of the props that linked in with the title. This was due to this convention of concealment of actors faces. Indeed, in the Dark Knight posters that do include the characters, their faces are obscured by certain objects relevant to them (joker card, throwing bat knife, Harvey Dent badge). Again, having the face obscured slightly is another convention of teaser posters, if the face features at all, as shown in the posters featured below from Wolverine, G.I.Joe and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.