Introduction
For this project, you will be taking a movie poster for a movie you enjoy and flipping its genre. Movie are sorted into genres. Whether a movie is a comedy, horror movie, or romance, genres are fairly easy to use. Maybe most interesting of all though is the fact that you can usually identify the genre of a movie within a few minutes of seeing the poster. Take for example these two Winnie the Pooh posters:
Without knowing anything about the movies or even reading their text, you immediately can tell that the movies have very different takes on Winnie the Pooh. Movie posters use design choices in colour, fonts and even poses to help tell the reader what the movie is about. By making this easy to identify, it helps a movie sell itself to fans of that genre without too much effort.
In this project, you will be need to use Photoshop skills such as layer masks, image editing techniques, and blending to help take a movie poster and change the genre. You will use what you already know about colour and font choices and use them to help create a poster that does not represent your movie in any way.
Guide
- Before you can start this assignment, you need to select a movie that you want to make a new poster for. Choosing one that has a very clear movie poster might be a good place to start as it’ll make it easier to change the genre.
- Once you have chosen a movie, choose a genre that you want to remake the movie poster in. To get the best results, you should try to choose a genre that is opposite what it already is. For example, change a horror movie poster to a romance movie poster.
- Open Photoshop and create a blank document. Remember that we want to make anything in the size that we want to print in. In this case, select US Paper for the document size. This will create a document that is 8.5×11″ in size, and at 300 dpi (which is print quality).
- Add guidelines to your poster. Turn on rulers. You should add a border that is 0.5″ around the outside of your document, as well as guidelines across the centre (remember that these will snap as you drag the guideline). If you want to add more guidelines, you are free to do so, but adding these lines helps create a very basic grid layout.
- To create your new poster, it may be helpful to find another poster that you can alter. Look around for a new poster of the genre that you are wanting to use. Copy and paste it into your Photoshop document. Remember, that for best results, you should use Google rather than Bing which frequently does not let you copy and paste.
- Your job is to create a new poster for your movie of choice. You should change images, the title, and any additional information such as quotes, taglines, or actors so that it matches your original movie. To do so, you will need to use the following tools:
- Layer Masks – Use layer masks by clicking on the icon at the top of the layers list. Adding layer masks allows you to make parts of images transparent without using the eraser which means anything you remove can be recovered if needed.
- Clone Stamp – The clone stamp tool works by duplicating part of a layer into a new area. Use it by selecting the layer you want to duplicate from, hold alt to show a crosshair cursor, and select where you want to duplicate. Let go of alt and you can now click to ‘paint’ this somewhere new (including on other layers). It may be helpful to use alt to re-select where you want to duplicate from more than once.
- Colour Adjustments – When you are adding something to a poster, often the tones and colours will not match. To fix this, select the layer, and go to Enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color in the top menu. Use the eyedropper to select which colour you want to adjust. From here use Fuzziness to select more or less tones similar to what you have selected, and adjust the Hue (colour group), Saturation (intensity of hue) and Brightness to get the new colour you want.
- Text Tool – When adding text, click and drag a text box rather than just clicking and typing. Then adjust the size and colour you want at the bottom. Remember that you should choose a font and colour to represent your new genre.
- You may find it easier to use other tools as well, but your finished project should be recognizable as your original movie (should include key characters, actors, or scenes), while also reflecting your new genre.
- When you are done, hand in your assignment on Teams as a photoshop (PSD) file.
Key Concepts
- Viewer Bias – How do our expectations and what we think we already know change impact the message?
- Colour Selections – How do we represent an emotion or feeling with colours?
- Focal Points – How do we direct the viewer where to look?
- Grid Design – How do we align our designs?