Third and Final Poster

After my previous two posters, I had a much better idea of what I wanted - I wanted a poster to reflect the difference in her behaviour between the start and end of the film. I thought it should reflect her dual nature, and so I decided to go with an image of her against a wall looking at a poster of herself. I thought this was very postmodern and an ambitious idea for a poster. I drew up an initial plan:

As you can see, my drawing skills are abysmal. However, this gave me enough of an idea that the poster would work and I decided to go ahead.

I decided I could adapt one of my previous poster designs to fit this frame - I chose the scarface-inspired one as I felt it reflected the thriller theme. I cropped the poster and adjusted the background to give this:

I added in the title, in the trailer's style. I decided to move the words around and to slant one of them, as I felt this added an extra dimension to the poster.

I then added a billing block, as is traditional in posters, and two reviews. I didn't spend too much time on these, as I knew they would end up being fairly small on the final poster, so they are just fairly simple stars and the name of the institution. Here is the final result, which I'm quite pleased with:

Now for the main poster, I wanted an image that was nothing like what was in our film, but reflected a few themes. For this I brought our actress to a brick wall - a theme which we saw a few times in our trailer, but this was an entirely different wall. I couldn't find any stretch of wall with nothing else on it, so I settled for this photo:

I initially liked the low angle, but later decided the wall should be flatter to camera, as the perspective was otherwise off. There was also some noticeable barrel distortion due to the wide-angle lens I was using, and I knew I could fix all this in post. After much effort, I straightened up the picture, corrected the distortion, and removed the parts of the background that aren't wall:

I then added a Curves adjustment to increase the contrast and make the photo look a bit better:

I then found a picture of a poster on a wall, and just cut out the frame. I liked this frame because it was simple and would blend in reasonably easily with my background.

I then placed the poster from earlier. I flipped the frame round so it would be more consistent with the scene's lighting, and added a gradient to the poster to the same effect. It's not perfect but it's good enough for this application.

The wall was looking pretty bare so I added some text around the actress - in a similar style to the Lion Oscars poster. I also created a displacement map for the wall so it would look like the text was actually on the wall rather than just sitting on top of it - The final result is something I'm very pleased with.

This was an ambitious design, and I'm not sure it's quite worked - in my opinion, the main thing off with it is the lack of matching colour schemes between the wall's poster and the main event. Perhaps a red wall or red text would have done it justice, but in the end I couldn't quite pull it all together. Next time I would work harder at this.