What are the main conventions of film posters in terms of technical codes?

One of the conventions of a film poster is obviously the film title, without the film title we wouldn’t know what film it is. However there are exceptions to this, one being Harry Potter6(right) which only had a picture of the main star Harry Potter played by Daniel Radcliff, and the word 'HP6', as Harry Potter is such a well-known book and film, and the scar being a well-known iconography that by just having these things on the poster, everyone knew what film it was and that the film was coming soon.

This is an example of a billing block from the film Watchmen

The Billing Block is also a convention of a film poster, this is normally written in very tall skinny letters, and provides lots of info for example everyone that helped make the film like the crew and anyone that helped fund the film.




Another convention is a picture of the main star, which is usually shown in the foreground of the poster. If the film had an A-list actor being used, these would normally be the person that would be shown as when people see the picture of the A-list actor, they are more likely to go see it, this can be seen in the INCEPTION  film poster shown above, Leonardo DiCaprio is the main person because he is well known, and also the main protagonist in the film. Linked with this is the Star name, this would have all the main stars names shown, and if an A-list actor is used, their name would probably be quite big aswell to catch peoples eyes.

The tagline is a line, that is normally catchy, sometimes funny, that would give some insight into the film, and also make people want to watch it, it could include a red-herring or other sorts of techniques to get viewers interested.

The background image, normally gives a insight of the themes and genres of the film, also might give more informatin of what the film is about.