Quiz 4

These are the two movie posters I studied for my quiz, both great movies, but very different in pretty much all aspects. Hopefully, I was successful in my attempt to make Mean Girls look like a guy pick in the picture below.

It was an interesting experience to compare and contrast the movie posters for Mean Girls and Inception. Analyzing the various elements in both posters opened my eyes to the fact that most movies in the same genre really do set up their advertising very similarly. Chick flicks really use bright colors and happy or humorous pictures while action films go for darker images and hues. To begin with, it is very easy to find contrasting qualities between Mean Girls and Inception. The films are vastly different, from the aspect of target audience all the way to film content.  The poster for Mean Girls is very feminine, the background and text are various hues of purple. All the people on the poster are young adult females, and they are all very well dressed and pretty. There is no background content, leaving you to focus primarily on these girls and what they look like and how they are dressed. The girls in the background are all dressed similarly in pastel pinks, which are typically pleasing to the female eye, or at least associated with girls. The main character, Lindsay Lohan, is larger and dressed more boldly, but still looks clean and perfect. The lettering in this poster is also very playful and girly, large in some places, small in others. The alignment of the movie title with the main character’s body is very interesting and accentuates the separation between Lindsay Lohan and the clique of girls to the right. In general the poster is bright, colorful, and playful in tone. So, when you look at the Inception poster there are stark contrasts evident. To begin with, the overall hue of the poster is very dark with an eerie blue. There background image is very busy and important, the maze city is the primary setting of the film and where the action and adventure takes place. I feel that it gives a vibe of action and intensity to the poster. There is a lot going on with perspective in this poster, it really keeps your eye moving, as opposed to the stationary qualities in the Mean Girls poster. The text on the Inception poster is very simple and spaced out. It is smaller and less accentuated than the text in the Mean Girls poster. All minor text on the poster is white, but the title is in a bold red, with larger font than the rest. I notice that the text information on the Inception poster is very centered and blocked in, reading left to right, top to bottom. However, the text on the Mean Girls poster is used as a way to make your eye move on the poster in strange directions. The characters on the Inception poster are different from the ones on the Mean Girls poster since they are not impeccably dressed and polished. There is a rugged feel to them; some of them are even holding weapons. Their clothing is also very monochromatic and dark. A comparison I have noticed between the two posters is the composition of the people. In both posters, the main character is larger than the others and your eye in drawn to them first. There is also a clear spacing between the characters in both posters. The Inception poster lays everyone out in a nice consistent way, a tactic that seems to be used in most action movie posters. The Mean Girls poster uses’ spacing in a similar way, but it is grouped three to one. The facial expressions are surprisingly similar on both the posters, very pensive and serious. However, the rest of the information provided in the separate advertisements lead the viewer to different assumptions about why the expressions look the way they do. Basically, the Mean Girls poster lends itself to the “chick flick” label the second you look at it. The Inception poster however, attracts the male eye with its dark and manly qualities, and a setting of mysterious adventure.