NEW IMAGE:
Original image by - Beth Icard
Everything below is still true, nothing really changed, but it was bothering me that the fonts I used were "wrong," so I took the time to find a much higher-resolution official poster here to pull text from using color range selection and I replaced the text I had previously used. I also added the stars' names on a classmate's advice, and I think that was an improvement as well. No dramatic changes here -- just a couple little things. :)
Original image by - Beth Icard
I've actually been working on this assignment off and on for a couple of weeks. I was really excited when I saw we had a movie poster assignment coming down the line, so I wanted to get a head start on it. I worked through a few different ideas before I landed on the concept I ultimately settled on. Originally, I intended to imitate the famous Francis Cugat Great Gatsby cover in the style of La La Land, both because I thought it would be visually striking and because I think there's an argument to be made that both stories are kind of about sadness and longing and dreaming. However, I got frustrated with that. Although I didn't hate what I was coming up with, I couldn't quite make them do what I wanted, either.
Then I started paying attention to the "reduced realism" portion of our lesson for this week, and I was greatly inspired by this image from section 7:
Then I started paying attention to the "reduced realism" portion of our lesson for this week, and I was greatly inspired by this image from section 7:
Desert Sunrise by Nathan Smith
I wanted to try my hand at this kind of color-blocked, silhouetted, reduced-realism image. I found a silhouette of LA that I liked, and then I pulled selections out of an image of the San Gabriel mountains outside LA for the background.
I pulled colors from the official La La Land poster for each "piece" of the image I created. These feel like the "right" colors for the movie. I'm probably just used to associating the original poster with the idea of the film, but I couldn't imagine using a different color scheme. I also made a selection from a high-quality image of Mia and Sebastian to create the silhouette I used.
I used a line from "Mia and Sebastian's Theme" to give my dancers something to stand on and because I loved the symbolic effect.
Image found here
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Song composed by Justin Hurwitz, video courtesy of Youtube
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Process:
- I made my canvas 13x20", which is about half scale of a traditional movie poster (27x41"). Photoshop overcorrected me, so it's not exact, but it's close. (I didn't think that even my high-res images could quite stand up to a canvas sized like a traditional poster, so I scaled it down.)
- I made selections of the LA skyline and pieces of the San Gabriel mountains and then placed them where I wanted. I stretched the mountain selections a little to get the effect I wanted, but since realism is skewed anyway, I didn't figure that mattered.
- Using the eyedropper tool, I pulled purples and blues from the original poster and then filled each piece with the color I wanted.
- I used the pen tool to make the staff, and then used the pen tool and the ellipse tool to make the music notes. I used the alignment tools to space them equally.
- I selected the image of Mia and Sebastian dancing and then filled the selection with white before placing the silhouette.
- I couldn't pull the text from the original poster because it was too low-res. I also couldn't download the exact font used for the title (a fact which made me very sad) because it wasn't free and I wasn't willing to pay for it, so instead I used a font that kind of behaved the same way. It's even called Broadway, which I thought was appropriate, given the context.
- Believe it or not, I actually didn't intentionally copy the tagline from the original poster. I didn't even remember that was there until I looked again later. Instead, I chose a line from one of the songs in the movie that I thought was fitting. (Or I thought I chose it, anyway -- I probably did subliminally recall the line from the original poster, but whatever. It wasn't on purpose.)
Design thoughts:
- I loved our readings this week, and I tried to incorporate some of the ideas.
- Because we learned that things placed at the bottom of the canvas are interpreted as being closer to the viewer than things placed at the top, I set up the "scene" that way -- LA is closest to us and the mountains, even though they are tall, recede into the distance.
- I also used what we learned about color, and how things closer to the viewer are darker than things farther away. Again, LA is closest, so it's the darkest element, while the mountains fading into the sky get gradually lighter.
- However, I also broke the "rules." The staff and the dancers, which, in some ways (at least in my mind), are hovering in front of the poster, are closest to us, but I didn't keep with the rules for placement and color. They deliberately interrupt the background of the piece and demand attention, because that was what I wanted.
Aborted ideas:
I made the poster above in an attempt to lovingly imitate the famous Gatsby cover shown here. It looked silly when I isolated just Emma Stone's eyes and lips, so I used her whole face instead only a couple of features. I pulled colors from the official La La Land poster to create the gradient background and I manipulated my way into using the official font by copying a selection from the official poster as well. (These were smaller canvases when I was originally playing, so resolution wasn't a problem when I pulled selections of the font from the original poster.) However, I wasn't completely happy with this image.
These were further attempts to imitate the book cover, though less literally. The one on the right is exactly the same as the one on the left, I just applied a black and white adjustment layer and then a hue/saturation adjustment layer and colorized it. In some ways, I think these versions work better than the one above left, but I still wasn't happy, so I landed on my final concept instead.