Professional Practise: Echoes of Silence Poster 1

The first attempt I had at making a poster was a minimalist poster for Echoes of Silence which Brad had sketched and then I took and made a digital, cleaner version of then made some tweaks based on his and other's feedback, this is the process I went through to make said poster.

This is the original poster Brad sent me to make, it features a burning casket on the sea.

First I opened an A4 page and sectioned it into thirds so I could get the ratio of sky to sea accurate.

 Then I had to find the right shades of blue and draw two rectangles to fill the space of sky and sea.

 Next I googled, wooden casket, found a picture that was taken from the angle I needed and added this to the image. I then removed the brown background by tracing around the casket with the magnetic lasso and selecting the inverse and deleting it so that only the casket remained.

The next step was to firstly resize the casket to fit where I wanted it and the size of it. At this point it was still the raw wooden picture of the casket, so from here I lassoed three polygon shapes for the three areas that light is hitting the casket and I then block filled the casket with these three shades to make it 3D by adding shadow. This worked quite nicely I feel as you can tell that this is a wooden casket without there being any detail and this is what minimal posters are all about.

Next was to add titles, Brad said he wanted a thin but blocky Sans Serif font so, upon trying a few I settled on the font Letter Gothic Std as this I feel was most fitting for what he wanted. I then tried googling the font that is usually used for the credits at the bottom of a film poster to no avail but I did find that it was a compressed thin font that is almost always sans serif, as a result of this find I scrolled through all the options on photoshop and found that the most suited was Avenir Next Compressed. I then added the credits and positioned them under the casket, later on I did move them down slightly so they were more central.

 Next was to add the fire, to do this I first attempted to draw my own free hand, however, given that I was using a laptop track pad and I am not very good at drawing anyway I scrapped this and instead got a cartoon image of a fire, I could have just added this in and more or less be done with it, however,  did not feel that this would be my own and as such wanted to edit it as much as possible to make this poster as much completely my own as I could. So I used the area selection tool and selected the whole fire and coloured it in the above shade of orange.

 The orange on its own did look okay but I felt a little too basic, as a result of this I duplicated the orange layer, downsized it slightly, repositioned it over the first set of flames, coloured it a darker shade of orange and removed the bits of flame that aren't attached to the main body. This I feel looked much better but was still minimal and basic.

The feedback I received on the fire however was that it just sort of looked like it was there and not particularly on the casket, as a response to this I simply added a glow at the bottom in the form of a darker orange oval that sits on the casket and adds to the fire, this I feel really helps to tie the image together.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the poster could have been considered to be done, it wasn't and I decided to make some more changes based on feedback and my own preference, but nonetheless this could be used as a poster at this point.

Brad then asked if I could add some waves so I took this image and removed the blue so that it was just the white lines in between. I then had to duplicate this and put the second line of waves just above the first and behind the credits.

This was the first attempt at waves, I must say I was not a fan, it was too busy in comparison to an empty sky and I felt it just didn't look good in practise, however, I didn't just scrap the idea.

I then removed some of the lines of the waves to make it more subtle and less busy which I feel worked well, I now like the inclusion of the waves from a personal viewpoint. I also darkened the sky based on the feedback that Brad wanted it to look more like it was approaching night time and I felt the previous blue was too bright for this.

I did however receive mixed feedback on the waves so as a result I have saved two versions of the poster, one with waves and one without, personally I feel with it better but from here I have two options to put forward for the film poster. The beauty as well of such a minimalist style is that It can be very easily upscaled depending on the size needed for the poster.