Creating A Poster

By DeeDee Doke

Creating a poster that will resonate with all kinds of different people – across different age groups, ethnicities and visual tastes – isn’t easy. And if the poster you’re making is supposed to prompt these very different people to take action, what’s the trick?

That’s a question daily debated by marketers, copywriters, artists and other creatives when trying to develop campaigns that will incite mass demand for a product or service in the contemporary consumer world. And the right solution will cost the client a pretty penny.

But for Ely Community Cinema (ECC), a sixth-form student created the concept and the artistic product itself for a poster that encouraged and invited everyone and anyone to come along, enjoy films and feel perfectly at home. Freyja G designed the poster that literally showed potential viewers “their” seat at the venue.

Asked how she developed her concept, Freyja said, “I started by doing research into the imagery that’s often used for a cinema – so, like, people in the seats and popcorn and those kinds of things. Then I put some of those images together and picked out what I liked about each of them to capture what I like about cinema; it kind of brings people together.”

In these days of streaming and sitting alone at home watching a film on some kind of device, the opportunity to share the experience is too often neglected, she pointed out.  “It’s important that people remember that with the cinema, you can be around other people. So, I wanted to use that.”

Her image began with a view of the back of three cinema seats, each occupied by a filmgoer. “Then I thought, it looks a bit too full,” Freyja said of the threesome. “I liked the idea of it seeming quite welcoming. One of my other ideas was to have a hand showing the person to a seat.” But then she saw the possibilities of using the welcoming message in text on the poster and depict an empty seat in the middle to suggest the availability of a place for the person looking at the poster.

Her work was reviewed by the cinema team and with a couple of tweaks, the poster was ready to go public. The whole process took place over “two or three weeks”, Freyja said.

Her involvement began when she contacted the cinema team to enquire about job vacancies for someone her age – “just any kind of job, I really like films”, Freyja explained.

So, while she was underage for paid work, her artistic background led marketing team chair Linda Spiers to offer her the opportunity to design the poster. “I thought it sounded really fun, because I do art and media at school and I thought it would be a good way of combining the two and getting, like, real experience,” Freyja said.

Linda said “when I saw Freyja’s design it blew me away. She’s really captured what we’re about, and we keep ‘this seat is for you’ in mind when we’re programming films and setting up events.”

With this experience under her belt, Freyja is working on a film trailer and an accompanying poster for a film she has made at college.

Her future, she hopes, lies in making and directing films after attending university from next year.