lobby cards Essay Example

lobby cards Essay Zaza, the lobby card I have chosen was a film based on a 1904 French play by Francois Berton and Charles Simon.Zaza was a successful film played by nearly every major actress of the day.To quote Paramount, It is a story ofsawdust and tears, backstage rivalries, dramas and heartbreaks. For this Lobby card Paramounts advertising department has ingeniously incorporated the style and feel of the nineteenth century French posters of Toulouse-Lautrec.This image came about as a distinct change of style taking place within the Paramount publicity department.They started to steer away from the now too familiar photo and text cards and started to develop cards that would eventually change everyones conception of cinema advertising.Paramounts publicity department cut out the figures of the stars and surrounded them in completely non-realistic backgrounds and highly stylised sets drawn in the most brilliant colours. Choice of lettering and overall layout of all lobby cards was essential to gain the correct impact need.In action films i.e., The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Ben Hur (1931), film companies used bright bold colours and garish statements in a bid to lure audiences to their films by impression alone. However with films like Zaza, they used a different concept of design all together, using fine art as a template. >From this point on, all the major production companies began to experiment around the old fashioned square photo and block text method of work.Some companies chose to take the look of photography to a higher plane using Ariel, circular and eventually panoramic images while some experimented with text alone i.e., Phsyco (1959).Others chose to take advertising away from the, by now, overused cards and began to branch out and develop, what is known in todays cinema world as, visuals. The text used on the lobby card for Zaza isnt particularly effecti