The poster competition (And my pick)

Tomorrow sees the results of our poster competition, which received over 100 entires from all corners of the globe, including Maurituis, the USA and Russia. It was a far greater response than I expected and the array of different designs and what people did with the images was fantastic and I look forward to seeing the winner!

The idea to do a poster competition came after we did the stills shoot in July. After creating some amazing images, I started thinking about the poster but found myself too close to it. In the film industry itself, posters are created by an entirely separate company (like Aitch Creative, one of our judges) so they can truly be objective and are talented in selling the ideas of the film to the public. As we couldn’t afford a marketing agency, I thought it would be quite cool to put the images out there for people to send us and rather than have us judge, people to vote on the winner.

As we found out during the competition, this did pose a problem in those that have more Facebook friends have more chance of going forward and some people felt they were mislead (although the rules were on our website J) that their design would not be there on merit. Whilst I understand this point of view (and been on the receving end of the more ‘popular’ films being put forward rather than my own in competitions) and agree to an extent, an important part of any industry and particularly this one, is the effort you put into and the faith you put into your project. Our own IndieGoGo campaign was successful not just because of the skill we exhibited, but because of the hard work we put into our campaign, as Thomas Edison once said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration J

But like I say, we also saw the point that peoples work perhaps wasn’t being ‘judged’ in the way they wanted, and whilst I feel that enough of the people voting were interested and being fair, there is always going to be people who just look at the one design and we didn’t want anyone to feel their design wasn’t appreciated or viewed. We have also been collaborative and listened throughout the process, so I decided that as well as the 5 most ‘liked’, we would have 5 of the crew, who know the story and how we want to pitch the film. I myself did not want to choose, as I felt my opinion may be taken too much into account, but when it came to it, I couldn’t help myself and had to give it a go!

John Fairley was my pick.

So our 11 designs went to our 6 industry judges, who have picked their 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice and through a points basis (15 points for 1st, 10 for 2nd and 5 for 3rd) we have our top 3 plus a load of feedback on various designs. Fingers crossed for you all!