Research and Planning: Photoshop Challenge.

Photoshop Challenge.

Our task was to create a film poster for the genre we plan on using in our trailers, using either images from the internet of possibly use our own if we had them, to challenge our knowledge of photoshop. 

I decided I wanted to do a thriller poster and focus on the psychological thriller side, I thought of  a basic plot for my film and worked from there. The first thing I had to do was find my images on the internet because I had no suitable ones of my own, I decided I wanted to use a male as the main focus of the poster so I searched for an appropriate actor and found a suitable image, which was a mid/head shot of him looking quite smug and the image was quite dark but the suit my poster I adjusted the image and changed the brightness and contrast slightly so that it was darker. I then wanted to create the effect of him merging with the dark background so it wasn't such a harsh image on the background so I created a rectangle shape the same colour as the background and then covered the image completely; I then changed to rubber settings so that the opacity was only at 10% and it was a very large brush and then began to press it over his face and uncover certain parts of the image, keeping some areas darker than others. I think that this part of the poster works really well and definitely fits the genre well because it's suggestive and has the dark side to it. I then wanted to fill up the space by adding an extra female character in, so again I searched for the right image and altered the brightnes settings although that did not work as successfully on this image as it was still quite bright and did the same with the rubber and the rectangle shape over the top although it did not work as successfully with this image, I'm not entirely sure why but the only thing I can come up with was maybe the image was to harsh in lighting against the other image which is a softer darkness. I then needed to give it the features of a film poster; the first being a title and slogan and to fit with the main focus of the poster which was the male character I decided to call it the Bachelor but because it's a thriller I needed to add some sort sinister twist so I came up with the slogan 'People aren't always what they seem' which hints at a more sinister twist to the film and ties all the images and dark colours together. I wanted to make the film title stand out more, so I looked for it's own individual font and I found the one I used which was Insomnia, I also made the text red because that is a common colour used in psychological thriller posters. I think that the title font does fit in with the theme and genre of the poster however I think that if I would have spent more time looking through the different fonts I may have found something that fitted a little bit better. I then decided to put the slogan and main actors names in the same font, (Bookman Old Style) and put them in white so that they stand out and also you can distinguish between the two. There was certain features on the poster that had to be included such as the rating and information which had to be in the font Steel Tongs, I like the placement of both the information and the rating because it's all aligned and kept neat underneath the title and doesn't interfere with the image in anyway, however I did forget to include the release date of the film which is quite important. So improvements which I would make to this poster would be to include the release date, and to clean up the female characters image, maybe use a different image which is a darker image so it is easier to blend the two images together to create a clean image.