Callum Henn

Candidate no: 7104

Poster construction

Stage 1The first stage in the construction process was to choose the image that was most appropriate to what we were looking for. Although the image hasn’t exactly met the criteria set om the original photo-shoot plan, my colleague and I are happy with the choice of image to manipulate. The reason for the use of this image is because the model is emotionless and the eyes are staring directly to the viewer therefore it shows direct address. The image also is also set in a dark location that appears to be very isolated. Where the model is slightly hiding behind the tree it almost looks like she is hiding ready to leap out on someone.

The chosen image was then put into Adobe Photoshop.

Photoshop allowed me to manipulate my image professionally and make my imagination come to life. The main of the next stage of the construction of this piece of media text was to give the models skin a more zombie-like look. To do this I used the sponge below. As you can see from the two images, the sponge tool has changed the skin colour of the model from a white skin tone to a green-grey colour meaning that I achieved my goal of giving the skin colour a more zombie-like look.

Stage 2

My task after this was to use the magic wand tool to select every specific area that I wanted to use the sponge tool on without the sponge tool affecting the unselected areas. By using this tool, it allowed me to give a good, clean and professional finish to the manipulation of this specific area. You can see the whole skin manipulated image above to the right.

Upon completing the task of manipulating colour the skin the decision I made with my colleague was to edit the eyes into a more red-ish colour because the colour red connotes, anger, aggression, hell and Satan. So I believe it was suitable to make this change to the eyes it was a very similar process to changing the colour of the skin, so to start I used the magic wand tool to select the part of the eye and the used the tool pictured below, called the ‘colour replacement tool’ this tool simply replaces the current colour of the selected image without affecting the light balance making the image still look realistic and natural.

Stage 3

Colour – replacement tool.

Stage 4 of the manipulation and construction process for this poster was very simple, we decided to add more focus to the main antagonist on the poster, so the decision was made not to sharpen the image of the model but to blur out the tree she is hiding behind because it will make the attention of the viewer go directly to the model rather than the tree. The tools that I used to complete this task was just the magic wand tool, once I had selected the tree a filter was added called ‘lens blur’.

Stage 4

Magic wand tool

The photo was now completed for image manipulation in Photoshop as you can see from the image below.

Now the image is complete, the image is inserted into Adobe InDesign ready for further manipulation to add in other generic conventions of a film poster such as, masthead, credit block, tagline, release date and film maker logo.

Stage 5One of the first things I had to do was trawl the web to find appropriate fonts to use. I visited the website ‘1001fonts.com’ The two I downloaded were named ‘Cenobyte’ and Demon Sker’ the reason why I downloaded these fonts was because I felt that they suited my magazine and the fonts them self were in a typical sort of horror style, Cenobyte had sharp points and was a very gothic type where a Demon Sker looked like painted blood which I thought would work really well with my poster, fortunately it did and I managed to import them into InDesign successfully and incorporate it into my design well. Cenobyte would be the font used for the masthead typography and Demon Sker would be use to inform the audience that the film is coming soon. Examples of the different types of font can be seen below. As for the credit block and the tagline I used standard fonts already pre-loaded on the iMac to keep it clean and easy to read because of all the differentiated font already on the poster. I also incorporated the film logo I designed my self as seen at the bottom right corner of the page.

I scoured the internet for artificial, copyright free and free to use images to help my product reflect the horror genre in more detail. The image I found were these claws. I thought that these claw makers were appropriate to use for several reasons. The first reason was I think it maintains the representation of the horror genre. These claw marks denote that danger is near and the main antagonist is dangerous because it connotes that she is ready to kill or injure anything that gets in her way. Another way in which it’s useful is it fills the blankness left on the tree trunk. This is the final result of adding the claw marks. The main tool I used to execute this change was the select and drag tool below.

Stage 6

Stage 7For stage 7, it was just the simple task of compiling everything together. I incorporated all the created text and artificial images onto the InDesign page and fit into the most appropriate positions. You can also the final manipulated image on age too which is the main focus point of the poster. All in all I think the poster is a success and turned out better than I originally thought. As you can see I have a right balance of colour using predominantly whites, blacks and reds with the tree and the main character standing out because of the contrasting colours. I think I have followed conventions because I have included a tag-line, masthead, release date (sort of), credit block and use of a dominant image and also stuck to a specific set of colours.