Introducing a teaser poster & audience feedback

We decided to introduce a teaser poster in order to develop our campaign. We used the shot of Mila at the end of the film to make it look tense and scary and her facial expression shows anger and evil.

I used the quote that we used at the top of our original final poster and put this at the bottom of Mila's face on the teaser poster. As this was too plain to be a teaser poster, I then added '#SENSELESS' and 'COMING SOON' at the top right corner of the picture. This is to connote that this poster is no ordinary poster and it is also being used to promote the actual film so that people can watch it.

After playing about with different filters, I decided to crop out Mila's eyes and play around with the different hues and saturations of it to make her seem inhumane and abnormal to the rest of the human race. I then had two ideas: 1) If I changed the eyes to red then it would conform to the convention of the horror genre as the devils usually have red eyes or are associated with red eyes and so this would be perfect to use as a horror movie teaser poster. However, with audience feedback, people had said that red eyes would be too conventional and boring. I also realised that this would give away the plot of the film, as we wanted our narrative to be restricted to an extent where the audience do not find out that Mila is the killer of her bullies until the end of the film.

This lead to my decision of having a gradient on her eyes. I used the rainbow coloured gradient as an overlay and used the slide bar to change the opacity of it in her eyes. This made it look like there is something weird with colours happening in her eyes. The reason why I chose this is because it links to the film when I edited in the prism FX when Mila's brain starts to malfunction because of her manic depression and pseudo identity, and then she takes the anti-depressant pills to calm her down. This not only connotes that there is something wrong with her but would also attract a further audience as people would wonder why her eyes are like that (my preferred reading, Stuart Hall's reception theory) and then would want to come and watch the film.