Four simple steps are involved in making a movie poster. These are: prepare by watching the movie several times; create the poster background; round up the main characters; and create the title and other texts.

Making cheap movie posters is not as complicated as it seems. To start off, we must establish that first and foremost, a movie poster’s purpose is to attract attention, as it is one of the factors that can make or break a movie. A bad movie poster could make a supposedly great movie uninteresting to those moviegoers who decide on which movie to watch based on posters alone. Also, a thing to consider is that these moviegoers would only glance at posters for a couple of seconds, so the movie poster needs to tell as much as possible about a movie—without, of course, being a substitute to watching the movie itself. It’s important not to have a lacking poster, but it’s also as important not to overdo it.

Prepare by watching the movie several times

If necessary, watch the movie a couple of times in order for you to be familiar about it. Then, take note of the parts which had captured your interest the most. Which scenes of the movie made it so unforgettable? Which scenes awed you the most? Perhaps you can have your friends watch the movie with you as well so you can gather more opinions. You might have different choices, and you can use these choices to come up with a more general concept about the movie.

Create poster background

Let’s begin. First, there are three major parts of a movie poster: the background, the characters, and the text. For the background, choose the best scene from the movie based on your choices from the preceding section. Take note that your choice of colors is very important as it will portray the mood of the movie. Then, take a still of your most favorite scene and upload it to Photoshop.

Round up the main characters

Next, round up the main characters of the movie and choose the scenes which had portrayed them most flatteringly. Usually, movies release pictures of the actors and actresses from photo shoots. You can also choose from this. When you’ve made your choice, upload the picture/s to Photoshop and arrange them on top of your background. We’re almost done!

Create title and other texts

Lastly, we now go to the texts. This is as important as the images. For the title, Photoshop has a text tool which enables you to choose from varied fonts and styles. The title has to be large and striking because it has to be seen from afar. Choose a color which complements your background picture. If there are other texts aside from the title (e.g., the showing date), they can be styled differently but make sure that somehow the texts would still go together. Then, there are the names of the cast members and crew. This can be placed either on top or the bottom of the poster and is written using a small font size.

There, we have made our very own movie poster!