Stills, Poster & Key Art
Images do the heavy lifting. The stills you choose become the pictures the press publishes, and your poster is the single image that represents your whole film. Get these right and your kit looks like a real film; get them wrong and no amount of good writing saves it.
People are visual, and press coverage is visual — an article needs an image, a festival program needs a photo, a social post lives or dies on its picture. So the images in your EPK aren't decoration; they're some of its most consequential content. Two matter most. Your press stills are the selection of photographs from the film that outlets will actually publish, so choosing and presenting them well directly shapes how your film is seen. Your poster / key art is the single image meant to capture and sell the whole film at a glance — the first impression on a festival wall, a listing, a thumbnail. This chapter assumes you gathered real stills during production (Chapter 4); now it's about selecting, preparing, and presenting them, and about getting a poster that makes your film look like it belongs. Strong images can make a modest film look enticing; weak ones can make a great film look amateur.
Choosing and preparing your images
What makes press images work:
- Curate, don't dump. Offer a tight selection of your strongest stills — around 5 to 10 great ones beats 40 mediocre ones. Include a range: characters, key moments, the mood of the film, maybe a BTS shot.
- High resolution, always. Press needs print-quality images (generally 300 DPI / large pixel dimensions). Low-res or compressed images can't be published well. Provide the biggest, cleanest files you have.
- Pick images that tell the story. Choose stills that convey character, tone, and intrigue — not just technically nice frames. A compelling, evocative image gets picked up; a pretty but empty one doesn't.
- Label and caption. Name files sensibly and, where useful, note what's pictured and photo credit. Make it effortless for an outlet to use the right image and credit it correctly.
- The poster — clarity and genre. Your key art should communicate the film's genre and tone instantly and read even as a small thumbnail. Title legible, image striking, mood unmistakable. Simplicity beats clutter.
- Get design help for the poster. If design isn't your strength, this is the place to trade a favor or spend a little on a designer — a bad poster undercuts everything, and a strong one lifts the whole kit.
Your images set the perception
The principle to hold onto is that your images control the first, fastest impression of your film — often before anyone reads a word. A programmer scanning a wall of posters, a reader scrolling a festival lineup, an editor picking art for a review: they react to the picture in an instant, and that reaction colors everything after. This cuts both ways and it's why images deserve real care. On the poster specifically, resist the two classic indie traps: cramming in too much (a cluttered poster with five faces and three taglines reads as amateur — the strongest posters are often strikingly simple), and using a poster that hides the genre (if your horror looks like a drama or your comedy looks grim, you'll attract the wrong audience and repel the right one). A good poster makes a promise about the experience; make sure it's the right promise. On stills, remember you're curating a gallery, not emptying a hard drive — a handful of genuinely strong, high-res, story-telling images serves you far better than a bloated folder, because you're making it easy for a busy person to grab exactly the right shot. And presentation matters: sensible file names, print-quality resolution, and clear captions/credits signal professionalism and remove friction. If your gathered stills are thin, this is worth a small investment — a short portrait session with your lead in costume, or pulling the single best high-res frame and treating it properly, can give you the one hero image a kit really needs. The through-line of the whole course applies here too: a small film with excellent images looks like a real film, and that perception opens doors. Invest in your poster and curate your stills like they matter, because to the people deciding your film's fate, they absolutely do. With your visuals sorted, the final piece of the written package is the document that hands journalists a ready-made story — the press release, next.
I once sent an outlet a folder of forty stills and a busy, cluttered poster, and they used none of it — too much to sift, nothing that popped. Next film, I did the opposite: eight hand-picked, high-res stills that each told a bit of the story, and a clean, simple poster where the title was legible at thumbnail size and the genre was unmistakable. That poster got shared, and those eight stills showed up across every piece of press. Same effort in the shoot, wildly different result in the selection. Curate ruthlessly, keep the poster simple, and get design help if you need it — the images are doing more to sell your film than you think.
Assemble your EPK in the Filmmaker Toolbox — keep your synopsis, bios, stills, poster, and press release organized in one place so you can export a clean, up-to-date press kit the moment a festival or journalist asks for it.