How Visuals Inspire Emotion
By Laine Geary
When revisiting the IMAGE assignment, I decided to take the phrase, "…the one we have eyes for" (p. 10, Berger, 1972) from John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing. Going back and reviewing readings from my college days has been an interesting and refreshing experience thus far, but I had a difficult time figuring out what phrase from these readings would work well as a movie poster. Back in the fall of 2024, when I was actually taking my Media Communications CUE and had to complete this assignment, I had decided to use the title of one of our readings to inspire my poster. I originally made a movie poster using the title "Springtime Everywhere", which is also the title of an article by Lara Chapan. This movie was meant to be an ecological thriller, reflecting what I was learning in my Environmental Communication course that I was taking at the same time.
While redoing this assignment, I wanted to focus on how different visual facets impact the atmosphere of a movie poster. So, after choosing the title of my movie, "The One We Have Eyes For", I decided that I wanted to make it some sort of psychological thriller. I chose to have a large eye in the background, looking out on the silhouette of a woman, who is meant to represent the main protagonist of the film (the one "everyone has eyes for"). Using only the pupil and iris was meant to make the poster more ominous, as was changing the color of the iris to a less natural color. Even still, the poster wasn’t quite fitting the vibes I was going for. So I decided to fiddle with the font of the text, and ended up choosing one called "Lacquer".
All this being said, I am not completely satisfied with this poster. I originally wanted to have more eyes looking at the woman in the center, but since I don’t have access to Canva Pro, I was limited in terms of the assets that were available to me.
(Note: The names on the poster are purely fictional and were obtained from the poster template I used in Canva)