Postcard

The postcard, an essential section of the project components, is a tool used for advertising and marketing.  Similar to posters for movies with a theatrical release, postcards are used as an easy way for short films to make their presence known at festivals.  Those who have worked on the project tend to pass these out, which builds intrigue and curiosity in the audience, leading them to be present in the viewing.  Therefore, we had to meticulously choose what to include in our postcard; for much of our audience, this is the only chance we have to impress them and sway them to come to see our production.

When my group and I divided the project components equally amongst ourselves, we decided that we would all play to our strengths.  For these reasons, I (as the resident art kid) took on the task of creating the postcard.  Using the knowledge I acquired through my previous research, I knew that we had to include the title, key art, major names, dates/times of the viewings, and the film festival we are showing our production at.

To create a visually interesting composition, I choose to manually illustrate our character.  This ended up being incredibly time-consuming and a little bit of a naive choice, but the payoff was ultimately worth it.  Once we had the illustrated base for our character, I was able to add in the most important (and yet, very tastefully subtle) detail: the monkey being reflected in his glasses.

Afterward, it was time to upload everything into Photoshop and pull it all together.  After playing with the text composition for a while, we chose to have the title of the film as a sort of masthead above everything, and the important names next to the character.  We then added a gradient overlay filter to the illustration and some dust texture to the background for depth.

As for the back, we knew we had to include the dates and important info, and Clara and Virginia had the genius idea to have it emulate a calendar as a sort of reference to the film.  So, we opened Illustrator and made a mock calendar that included the dates and times of the showings.  After, we added our social media handle, the logo of the film festival we are "showing" our film at (manifestation is real), and a goofy doodle of a monkey that we've been using for branding on the social media page.  And finally, we used the same textured background for continuity.  

In the end, I'm happy to say that we're all incredibly proud of how the postcard came out.  I love how it's sleek and professional, and the viewer's eyes are perfectly drawn to all the key elements.  I think that the postcard is a good representation of our film, and I'm excited to see what everyone thinks!