500 Days Of Summer Film Poster

500 days of summer is one of the film poster I chose to analyse because not only is it one of my personal favourites but because of its quirkiness and complete contrast to ‘The Black Knight’ (a previous film poster we looked at in class) in genre, target audience and budget I thought it would be an interesting choice. I chose an early release film poster which is more of a teaser poster which means its purpose is to make the target audience aware of the film without giving away too much information. It is an indie romcom with a slightly quirky edge to it; the colours used on the film poster are all harmonious and pastel colours. It has three main colours to it; blue and yellow, these are all used as coventions within the genre of romance because they complement each other, they are also associated with summer and the sky which is the image made by the photos which again links back to happiness and love. The light blue background keeps the focus on the main point this being that the image is made up of lots of different photos of one girl in a mosaic style with a young man at the bottom sketching. All the images of her are close up ones which would create the idea that she is the main focus of his thoughts. However next to him the tagline writes “this is not a love story, this is a story about love!” which creates the impression that this isn’t your normal boy meets girl love story but it has a twist. The messages on this poster are primarily visual because it has hardly any written information and is primarily made up of a serious of images because of it being just a teaser poster and not wanting to give too much away.

The main target audience for this film is females because of it being a romcom but I would say the target age would be young adults who are generally interested in indie films because of the type of actors starring, especially Zooey Deschanel who has a quirky edge to all the characters she tends to play. I do however think that this film could have quite a large audience because of it being a romcom with a twist and I’d assume a lot of people could relate to the storyline. The genre conventions used are the typical boy and girl featuring on the poster which automatically tells us it is a romance, also it’s a simple layout with no action going on or any major graphics used. The USP used on this particular poster would be the tagline because of how it contradicts itself, the poster is selling the film with what seems to be a romantic storyline however with a twist making the audience ask why it’s not a love story and how can it be a story about love but yet it’s not what it seems. The information given on the poster is a lot less then on “The Black Knight” because it doesn’t give any date it just gives the name of the film, a small tagline at the bottom and a list of the producers and stars in the film again due to it being a teaser poster.

I think this poster is refreshing and the simplicity of it works well because of the quirkiness and the cartoon like feel with the small sketches around the image like doodles which could represent the idea of the boy falling in love as he sketches in the corner of the poster. I agree it communicates effectively with the audience because it includes all the connotations and conventions of a romcom film poster with the colours used and the boy and the girl, it all follows the pattern of a romance film however it suggests there is more to it! I also like how they’ve tried to make it slightly unique and instead of just having a boy and a girl on the film poster they’ve create an image in itself by using cut out photos of the girl (Summer) and how it creates the idea that she is on the boys mind and makes you ask the question is the love just one way or does she feel the same? And if so why is there so many images of her and only one of him?