Analysing Film Posters - Cloverfield

Layout

This poster has been laid out simply with an image that taks up the entire space on the poste with text positioned over it. The top of the poster is mostly sky and here there is a tagline which encourages the audience to look further down the poster. In The centre of the poster is the main focus as we can see something crashing through New York which appears to have left a trail from the water. This leads on from the tagline at the top of the poster. At the bottom the name of the film "cloverfield" has been placed with institutional references, directors names and so on. The release date is them below this. The text is clearly spaced out so the audience can read it easily.

Colours
The colours of this poster are dark and cool, mostly consisting of blues and greens. The sky looks ominous as it is cloudy and a grey/blue which merges in to a yellow glow coming from the city, which suggests that there is fire and destruction. Because pf the dark, dull colours, it looks as if there is a storm buidling, which again gives an ominous feel to the poster.

Image
The image has been composed so the audience is placed behind the statue of liberty looking across the water and towards the city. By doing this the audience follow the trail of destruction that leads towards the city. First they see the statue of liberty's head is missing, then they see the trail leading through the water, and then the fire and destruction in the city. This relates to the tag line "something has found us" because the audience is shown that something has found it's way towards the city, giving the theme that something is coming for all of us. The audience has been positioned in this image out of the city which creates a suspense as they can't see what is going on. This poster paired with the teaser trailer I previously analysed barely give anything any, just that something has found the city and is attacking it. The audience isn't sure what it is, but they know it can cause a lot of destruction. The image in this poster is taken from the teaser trailer, but is from outside of the city rather than in. We can see the destruction between the buildings, where we were previously placed in the teaser. We can also see the statur of liberty's head is missing, which we saw fly and land on the street in the teaser trailer. By placing us within the action in the teaser trailer, we feel the fear with the people, but we are then taken out when the teaser ends. When the audience sees the poster and recognise the scene, they feel a relation with the characters in the city and know what is happening, and feel completely helpless that they cant intrvene. Two types of fear are created through the teaser trailer and the image in this poster, which I think makes the film very appealing to the audience can really encourages them to see it.

Text
The tag line "something has found us" is particulary powerful. By refering to what caused the destruction as "something" the audience can tell it isn't human, which leads them in to the fear of the unknown. The audience finds out in the film that it is an alien invasion, and at this point they may suspect it but not know, which builds excitment and suspense for the film to be released. This tag line is in a bold, sans serif type face that is very easy and clear to read. It is also a type face that stands out, and the use of all capital letters makes it appear a very bold piece of text. The text is coloured a very pale, green/blue which means it is easy to read against the colours of the sky, but still keeps to the colour scheme. The title of the film "cloverfield" is in the same type face as "something has found us" but it is smaller and each letter is spaced apart. The type face also isn't as tall or large, but it still stands out because it is bold white against the dark bottom of the poster. The text also has faint, blurred copies of the title behind which suggests disorientation or a sort of ghostly image. The name cloverfield is suggesting that the humans are the clovers, and that they are much smaller than what is "picking" them. The release date is also white, but it is in a different serif type face that looks like it has come from a type writer. This perhaps suggests a theme that the film is being documented.

Institutional References
Underneath the title is a closely spaced passage of text showing all the copywrite details such as the porducers, directors, writers names and any insitutions involved. This type of text is usually featured on film posters. there is also some small institutional logos such as Paramount and bad Robot, which we also saw on the teaser trailer.

Mise-en-scene
From the mise-en-scene, the audience is placed in media res. We can tell it is a city because of the tall buidlings, and more importantly New York because of the staue of liberty placed at the front of the image. The lighting gives a strange atmosphere because it appears to be day, but it is quite dark. This usually suggests a storm or that it is dusk or dawn, which are sometimes mysterious parts of the day. This unusual lighting creates foreboding and suggests that something bad is happening or is going to happen. We can tell that destruction is happening because of the glimpse of fire in the city and the clouds of smoke rasing. This is only in one part of the city, which suggests it is only just starting and means that the audience's attention is not immediatl;ey drawn to it, which makes it more shocking when they see it. The components in this image have been set up to create a scene from the teaser trailer, but from a different perspective. In the teaser trailer we see something coming from between the buildings, which we can see in the distance in the poster. We also saw the statue of liberty's head fly through the sky and land on the street in the teaser, and here in the psoter we can see the head is missing. We can also see the trail that moves through the water and towards the city, which reminds us the mention of something huge coming in the teaser. The mise-en-scene of the image brings our memory back to the teaser trailer, making the poster more recognisable and interesting to the audience. By seeing what happened within the city and out without actually seeing what caused it, suspense is really built up nd it encourages the audience to watch the film and find out.