Poster development on Photoshop

After a thorough researching process for the poster, the inspiration was mainly from the poster from the film Shank. We went to our filming location and took several pictures of Shay - our main protagonist - standing in front of the flats. The idea sounded simple, to cut him out and place onto a background for our poster, however I soon came to the realisation this was going to be harder than I expected. 

I therefore took to YouTube to find a different range of tutorials that I could use to help me on photoshop, as I still felt like a beginner using this piece of software. I wanted to fade a picture of a London sky line onto the image. 

I followed these steps, but the colours were all off, and it looked very messy for what should be a high a level media standard. 

I then decided to continue on with our first idea of cutting Shay out, I used the eraser tool to go around the flats with such precision, and decided at first to keep the bottom of the road and the walls, so I could place it onto a background with ease. 

Following on from this, I realised I needed a background that I would be able to place the flats photo on top. I tried several photos, but I decided this would be the best one to do in order for it to look effective. 

I altered the image to dull out the bright lights that were coming out of the picture of London at dusk. 

After adjusting the flats image more and more on the picture, it became evident that having the roads looked unprofessional, and there was no way I would be easily able to merge these two together so that it looked like the flats were coming out of the ground. 

I erased these out and cut out Shay with precision, so that it appeared he was standing in the centre of the poster on top of a building, I wanted for it to appear that he was in control of London, his hometown, as this is what we try and project throughout our teaser trailer. 

I then had this to work with, but the flats image appear too different than that of the background image. It stood out too much, therefore I lost the quality of the background image. 

I blurred around the edges of the flats and Shay, so that it would look more realistic. This took time and a lot of detail was put in so that the quality of the flats would not be lost, and to be sure that on closer inspection, no part of the flats looked blurry.

After this, I blurred the horizon, so that the colours would mix in better with each other, and then blurred the sky outwards, the effect of this was that I created more clouds, creating a much more dramatic effect onto the poster. I then wanted to make the buildings stand out more, so I used the sharpening tool on a harsh but small size setting and went round the outlines of every building that I saw on the background, on some of the building I even went as far as going around the windows to make them more clear. This proved to be very effective and created an almost 3D effect. 

On closer inspection, I noticed that were was too much blur on the edges of the flats, I then used the sharpen tool again to get rid of this problem, however I noticed with the hardness setting too high, the quality of the windows was lost and the colours became too bright, so I had to find the best way to sort this.

I then tried to sort out the title, as my typography efforts before did not wok well on the poster, I tried both black, and white on the poster, however none looked good, so I put a red title for now. It still doesn't look how I want it to be, so this is a continuing process.

I downloaded several different billing blocks off the internet, but settled on this one. After researching, I made the names of characters in a larger text - using capital letters, and then made the other text such as 'presents' in lower case, which is a common convention of other movie posters. 

I then added the tag line at the top of the poster, and centralised this, as this is a common convention of other urban drama posters. 

 I then needed to add a production company to the poster, I went for the white version instead of the normal blue version, as this stood out better on the trailer.

Again, I blurred out the edges so this would come through better.

On the background I made it darker and burnt out the brightness of some of the London landmarks that were seen.

 

This is the poster incomplete, the title needs to be altered, but other than that, it's been a good learning curve for me and I feel like my skills on Photoshop have developed so much and I no longer need to use tutorials for most of the work that I do.