Poster Design- initial editing

 

For the film poster, we have decided to use closeup portrait shots of Akeldama's main characters. This idea was partly inspired by looking at this version of the film poster for Savages (below).

We found the poster grabbed our attention because of:

• The bold use of colour in the typography, a lime yellow which subverts the stereotypical use of red font for a thriller film
• The effect of layering different images was unconventional and worked well, as it draws your focus over the entire poster, rather than a specific section.
• The simplistic text "July 6"  is abrupt on the page, and the use of such sparse detail creates a sense of enigma, furthered by the use of no tag line.
• The poster is landscape; this allows for bigger typography, so the title "SAVAGES" can span the whole of the posters width making it more exaggerated, and dramatic. 
• The effect of the use of the word "SAVAGES" implies something sinister about the characters in the above closeups. The word connotes primitive behaviour or someone who is uncivilised, juxtaposing the relatively clean cut people shown in the images, with the exception of the two end images where the characters have been mysteriously masked with use of makeup, this is the only clue as to story line of the film.
• The lighting used varies, suggesting possible differences in the characters personalities. i.e. the fourth close up shows a women with bar like shadows across her face- a possible suggestion she will play the villainous role in the film as bars connote jail, or criminal activity. 

Despite the lack of text, the pictures alone give the audience a sense of intrigue and so today, I have started to begin editing some of our images in order to get a similar effect.

1. Firstly we took a close up shot of each of our characters faces and using the freehand selection tool on Adobe Photoshop, we could separate the background from the image of the person. (the original pictures)
(character Nyla)


(Character Malory)


(Character  Jesse)


(Character Drake) 


2. After this we copied and pasted the images onto PowerPoint:

 

This meant that we could layer the separate images on top of one another, too form one image which contained all of the main protagonists, also it made it easier to create a landscape picture by using a power point slide. 

3. I saved this into our shared folder, in jpg. form so that as a group we could access it easily and it would be saved as picture rather than as a presentation:

 4. So now we could edit the lighting and saturation of our picture, to do this I opened the Internet picture editor www.ipiccy.com (which looks like this:)

5. It has the basic editing tools; crop, rotate etc. But also has brightness and saturation adjustment, airbrushing tools etc. and is user friendly and easy to use. I started editing, by adjusting the lighting on the pictures, as they had been separate shots some where under exposed in comparison to others. (Below) the results of using a light filter, and increasing the brightness.

6. The first thing noticeable in the savages poster is the fact that there is no blank spaces. On the (above image there is a large white blank space above the close up shots, so I used the crop tool to get rid of the extra space.

7. By making these small tweaks in the editing stages, the picture has slowly improved, so we now have a solid wide landscape image to use as the foundation for our final film poster.