Pros & Cons of Primary/Secondary Research

One thing that all film posters contain is colour. Using Google Images to reseach, I found this picture which shows the effects of colour and how different colours connote different things:

(Source: https://rebeccahadley95.wordpress.com/page/3/)

Another piece of relevant information I found whilst conducting secondary research was this webpage that shows different font types used in film posters and how the font changes dependent on the genre.

This article gives effective information on what makes a good film poster with seven different points that help towards making a poster look good. It refers to 'AIDA' which is an effective formula in marketing and is used in thousands of poster designs. It stands for attention, inform (the customer), direct benefit and action.

In order to further do some secondary research I visited the College library and found some books about design. Here are some that I found:

This page described how the visual impact of a filmposter can relate to the film itself and vice versa,and that the poster alone can be
incredibly influential in the films success. 

This page said that text in all caps can affect
reading, and that Upper and lower-case letters
should be used for optimum readability. It also contained
some information about optimum pt. size for blocks of text.

 I also conducted some primary research about film posters, by making a short survey using Google Forms to get some information about peoples opinions on a film poster. Here are the results:

This shows that the colour scheme of the poster is effective in getting attention,
as well as the simplistic design which helps the character to stand out.

By including the director on the poster, the film appears a lot more likeable (dependent
on who the director is, (e.g. Spielberg would be better than Vicky Jenson)

The primary research didn't gather as much information as secondary did, however the results I did get were a lot more specific to what I wanted to know.

Overall, I found that secondary research is a lot more straightforward to gather and can provide a lot more information, despite not being specific. It's also easier to look further into a certain aspect of the research you're conducting when doing secondary research. Primary research is a longer process which takes more work, however it can be a lot more specified to what you want to do, and the information gathered is valuable. You can be sure that this information is also legitimate and up to date, unlike data gathered via secondary research.