Sherlock Holmes Poster Analysis

From the Sherlock Holmes poster we can tell a lot about the film, and the audience. Seeing that this is a teaser poster, the purpose of it is to ‘tease’ the audience, we can’t tell what the genre is from a glance. From deep analysis we can find out a lot.

From the weather and the colours, we can see that this film has dark qualities, and that there are elements of sadness. The characters are a contrast to this, because they are lighter than the background. This shows that these characters are the ‘heroes’ of the film, seeing that light symbolises good, and dark symbolises evil.

Another thing we can get from this poster is what the time period that it’s set in. The clothes suggest that the film is set in the 1800s, but also suggests that these two characters are wealthy, and high in society.

There isn’t an age rating on this poster, so it’s hard to tell what the target audience is. Seeing that there isn’t any blatant use horror, or any child-like images, we know that it is around the 12a to 15 rating.

The title font is big and bold. This shows power and importance. The actors’ names are right at the top and is in bold. Compared to the size of the main title, the actor’s names are smaller. The reason for this could be because the film is about one of the most well known detectives in fiction. The creators wanted the first thing people to read was the film’s title. This also helps to generate hype.

The entire poster is made using DTP. You can see this by the way the characters are superimposed on the background. It seems that one of the characters is in front of another. This could suggest that the character plays the protagonist, and therefore is Sherlock Holmes.