Poster Reasearch #2 - 'Between the Lines' - Sam McLeish

'Between the Lines' (Rollo Hollins, 2015, UK/US)

'Between the Lines' is a British-American drama-romance short film where "two young actors, strangers thrown together in a casting, spend a fleeting summer rehearsing and learning to fall in love on stage", according to IMDB.

Media Language & Genre

The poster for 'Between the Lines' is really beautiful to look at, even though you aren't really looking at much. For example, the shallow depth of field image and the grainy, sepia-style filter only allows for the consumer to realise that they are looking at the shadow of a female character. This isn't incredibly useful for an consumer because they are no closer to understanding what the film will be about, especially as the title is rather vague. 

Also, the layout of the poster is extremely disorientating, which is more useful for it's genre of drama but less so for romance. However, in comparison the first poster I've analysed, this poster is more useful because it clearly has the billing block at the bottom, as well as the awards that the film has received. Despite the fact that the text is small, it still there and it doesn't distract the consumer from the main visual.

Audience

The main audience that this poster tries to appeal to isn't exactly clear. In a way, this could be extremely useful because if it targets all genders, they are appealing to both at the same time, meaning that only one campaign needs to be run. This is also reflected in the title, as very little exposition is revealed, so they are less likely to turn away members of a potential audience with their genderised story-line. This idea is also represented in the lack of a specific age range that is clearly targeted, again due to the lack of information being released by the poster. 

Narrative & Representation 

These two topics are actually extremely difficult to talk about solely based on the poster. If there was a tagline on the poster (even though this isn't common for short films) you could then get some more basic information on what the film is actually about, but this isn't the case. Normally, if a poster showed an image of a female, you could assume that the film is supposed to represent women but in our example, this can't be done because you cannot see what she's doing or the location she is in. Overall, the designer of the poster is revealing no information at all, playing on human curiosity to make the audience go see the film. If you think about it, it's incredibly clever!