I just read Brett’s blog and thought her idea for a research paper was quite good. I started writing this response on her page, but it got too long and I didn’t want to clutter it, but I’m pretty sure she’ll get an email because I just linked to her blog. The iconography, typography, and visual aesthetic of a film are all very important parts of a film’s poster and fame. Certain fonts are so iconic (Blade Runner, Spiderman, Back to the Future) you can just see a single letter to know what film they came from.
Here’s a game where you guess what film an individual letter comes from (I scored a 30). Anyways…
It would also be fun to analyzes changes in posters through the decades (from classical hollywood to summer blockbuster), or in different parts of the world (Japan, Russia, etc), or how posters get changed for different countries (differences in US posters vs international release). There’s significant variance in how products are depicted from country-to-country and videogames and films are no different. Check out the Japanese (Left) vs. American (Right) covers for Rachet and Clank or Kirby.
I am also a sucker for soviet posters and aesthetic.
Even more applicable to your post is the controversy and reason behind the Zack and Miri poster you presented. I’m not sure if you were aware of the reasoning behind such a simple poster, but the proposed original idea was banned for being too controversial:
and they were forced to compromise with this totally tongue-in-cheek striped-down version:
It speaks towards the dual-standard censors have concerning sex and violence.
Even less related is an article i read recently about team colors in group competitive games. A study that analyzed thousands of Unreal Tournament matches showed that the red team won 55% of all games, which is a significant margin over the blue team. Granted, this study doesn’t really prove any causation, but I assume this figure is because the color red is so often a signifier for stopping (stop signs, lights, warnings, etc.) that a milisecond of confusion on a blue players part is enough for the red player to get the jump on him.