Film Poster Analysis - [500] Days of Summer (Webb, 2009)

Story: An offbeat romantic comedy about a woman who doesn't believe true love exists, and the young man who falls for her
Tagline: "This is not a love story. This is a story about love"
Genre: Romance, Comedy

I found a variety of different film posters for [500] Days of Summer, but this one in particular caught my eye. My original idea of having my character tell the story through his sketches actually stemmed from my viewing of [500] Days of Summer, which has some sketching aspects through the characters interest in architecture. This poster represents this idea, and having a sketch (opposed to a photo) for my poster would do the same. I feel that it also goes against the "cheesy romantic film" that I wanted to avoid - which would typically have photographic posters of a couple.

Simplicity
One of the main aspects I like about this poster is its simplicity. I feel that the most effective posters are the easiest to produce, so I do not want to over complicate things. The background is plain cream, and the sketches and titles are in black sans serif font. I like the way that the images are placed at the bottom of the poster in order to give the effect that the rest of the image is made up of the sky (the birds create this too), this almost "fills"the image, allowing for the simplicity of the poster to seem more realistic (like a scene has been drawn rather than just a tree, buildings and a bench). Like my film idea, [500] Days of Summer is a romantic (comedy) film although has a sad ending. Tom (the main character), doesn't end up spending more time with, or ever officially becoming Summers boyfriend. The poster seems to give the audience this clue. It looks sort of drab, showing that it is not a conventional romantic film. 

Ambiguous time-setting 
The blank background is a cream colour - perhaps the colour of how paper used to be in past decades. This gives the film an ambiguous time setting, just like how I want mine to be. It's effective in that the background is perceived as paper, making the poster seem like a sketch in itself - this suits the theme to the story (and would with mine) in an unconventional way.

Sketching
The sketch is actually a frequent location used in the film. The two characters are featured in this setting a number of times throughout the film. This makes the poster more iconic, ie it's not just a sketch. This would be really effective for my film idea. I would need my poster to feature at least one reference to the drawing theme for the title "A Sketchy Kind of Love" to make sense as a play-on-words, so a sketch of a negative/"sketchy" scene/situation would fit with this perfectly.

Conventional characteristics
In terms of characteristics of film posters, this one is quite unconventional. There is no quotes from critical institutions or no star rating. In order to fit the coursework criteria, my film poster would need to be more conventional - although I still like the minimalistic aspect and still feel I can achieve this. The billing block is situated at the bottom of the poster amongst the sketches - this could be in order to create this minimalistic effect through leaving clean space in the middle for the "sky". The films title is in big bold letters near to the top of the poster, it is usually quite conventional for the title to appear at the top so it can be the first thing the audience reads. The actors names are above the title which is also quite conventional in the way that the poster will be read - I like the idea of keeping all this conventional in order for my poster to be a mixture of conventional/unconventional in general - it's good to mix some things up, but not others - it still needs to resemble a film poster.