Nib: Anscillary Task - Poster Step-By-Step Build

I started off by taking a photo for the background image of a location seen in some of my trailer footage, giving a sense of consistency, though it quickly occured to me that this component did not follow all other examples of movie posters that i researched. i then used a clean sheet of metal so that the background had some texture and not a simple block of colour (which wouldnt be very proffesional, would it).

My origional background

Metal Sheet

I inserted a photo of my gorilla previously picked from my numerous line up of photos from my photo shoot. On this layer i cut out all of the green screen not via the magic wand as this proved to awkward as it left green in the fur around the edge of the suit, leaving a green outline. not what i wanted.

Metal Sheet with Gorilla

Used the tool to SELECT > COLOUR RANGE, and used the colour picker to choose the variations of greens, solving my problem. The problem this brought up, which i didnt realise until later is that it also took tiny segments of my gorilla with it (as black is comprised of all colours). I will explain how i combatted this problem later.

Select > Color Range

On the wall in front of me (behind my Mac, where i was working) is/was the picture poster of ' from hell '. At eye level was the perfect reminder that i needed a fine print text, listing all of the high-up names envolved in the creation of my film (trailer). i had great fun thinking of numerous variations of names to " fit the bill "

My Work Station

Film Information

Next i needed something which all Movie posters have, a title for my film. while joking around with the clowns in my class, i came up with the Name ' G-Day ' as a play on Z-Day which in itself is a play on D-Day. this helps to fit the generic parody that is my film. An army print text helped to create the idea that the gorilla is a threat to the public and needs to be fought by the armed forces.

Title

A lot of posters have dates or 'coming soon ' quoted, so i decided to do the same in the same army stencil font used for my title. To help these texts stand out i gave them each a 3pt stroke. to further the illusion that this is an army stencil used in a hurry, i used a splat behind the the ' is coming '.

Coming When

Coming Soon Splat / Paint Drip

To give the scale of the size of the gorilla i decided to fit somewhere in one of the texts a gorilla and a building forming the letters L and A (nicely fitting in the word gorilla, you may notice) but they didnt fit anyone noticeable. Luckily i was going for my poster to be themed for the character, the kind of poster you would see in the forum of the cinema as a collection (one for each character). following this idea, i named the character ' Gorillaarrgh '. this helped play with my generic parody, reflecting the 'old school' traits in films, one could argue are lost to modern-day films.

Gorillaaarrgh!

In this text i left out the two letters prementioned and the required amount of space to fit my custom letters.

The building was actually built with the most simple of programs, powerpoint, a series of rectangles. i then duplicated this layer (back on photoshop) and moved each layer one point to the right and up one, a simple way of giving a 3D illusion, after all no building is 2D. the first and third (from the front) layers i coloured grey and the 2nd and fourth, black. the gorilla i painted black leaving his face gray as a silouette.

3D building

No action/monster/parody poster is complete without a few bullet holes, so i scattered a few here and there, as though he (my gorilla) has just been fired upon, of course being left unscarred.
To go with the flow of the gorilla being the result of a top secret lab, i wanted the angled black and yellow lines found around a military door. so i created a serious of parallel black and yellow rectangles and cropped the them so that the corners were cut off.

Bullets + black and yellow lines

Cropped Black + Yellow Lines

I then gave the lines a minamal amount of opaicness, so that the metal texture could be seen through it. Now it looks like its part of the metal wall and not just stuck there by photoshop. i won' tell if you wont :) i used the blur and smudge tools along the edges of the colours to give a sort of war-torn effect.

Opaic Black and Yellow

Blurred /Smudged Black and Yellow

Right, here i noticed something that i mentioned at the beginning with my gorilla. when getting rid of the green screen i lost part of my gorilla. i noticed this because his head was showing signs of yellow.

Yellow noticed through the head

i can't stress how long it took me to work out what the problem was, but oh well i worked it out. to solve the problem i duplicated the layer of the gorilla and moved it a point to the right, problem solved. it took me ages to try work out a way to solve this when the answer was so simple. this also darkened my gorilla which gave nice unintended effect.

Problem solved

Blood Spatters

To give credit to my actors and to use them as a selling point, there names needed to go on the poster, as well as to follow the conventions of all other posters. to keep up the consistancy, i used the text from the title and the 'is coming' line.

Actors Names

Although the law of thirds applys to all components (excluding the quote line), the bottom third was looking a bit empty even with the gorilla, the title and the film information. therefore i felt it needed something else to go behind all this as a filler. que the explosion!

Explosion

This i produced from stock footage, after all i couldnt really go around blowing things up without permits and what-not. so from stock footage, (video files of explosions on black backgrounds) i found the frame i wanted and removed any unwanted things such as the black background, which i did via the magic wand, the one-click-wonder. this left a hard edge which i removed via a feather edged eraser.