Movie Poster

Artist Statement

The movie I decided to base my poster on is “The Grudge”. Long black hair is iconic to the movie, and so I thought that the hair would be the base for my poster. Through trial and error, I came to the conclusion that a white skinned hand clawing through the hair would prove to be the most eerie and effective way of promoting the movie. Using different shots of my hand and a long black wig, I was able to bring my poster together. I didn’t want to bring in too many elements into my poster, as I wanted it to stay simple. I personally believe that the simplicity also helps to make it much creepier. Despite its simplicity, I encountered many large obstacles along the way. The first difficulty was the background of hair. I had to crop this hair from a much larger picture, and that was a real pain. Because of the lighting in the room that I took the picture in, some parts of the wig were much brighter than other parts making the cropping process very stressful. Increasing the tolerance didn’t help either as it made the hair look very splotchy, losing the eerie effect. I got through this problem by making it a layer over a black background, the blur tool and various filters. The next issue was my hands. I initially wanted the hand to blue, so I inverted the colours of my fingers. While I did get the colour I wanted, the shadows on the fingers also reversed, making the whole hand look very awkward. As a result, I had to take new photos and fiddle around with the lighting to get it to look right. After doing this, I got the colour and the shadows right, but overall it seemed to clash with the rest of the poster. The red font with the blue fingers seemed kind of cheesy, so I changed the fingers to white. The final problem I had was blending. Making the fingers fit in naturally was an extremely difficult task. In fact, I had to cut out new pieces of hair to cover the top portions of the fingers so it would look right. Furthermore, I couldn’t just slap on these pieces of hair, I had to make them flow with the hair in the background. It looked really bad otherwise. I also needed the text to fit in nicely, and through the blur tool, this was accomplished. Because the hand colour was so un-natural, it also clashed with the background. I had to experiment with different filters and saturation to get it to blend well. I still think that there are some blending issues, but I did the best that I could and I think it looks fine.

Comments:

Well, I learned a lot from this project...many of the things, however, do not concern the program itself. The biggest thing I had to learn how to manipulate was lighting. As I described, this was one of my major difficulties. Although it may seem like such a minor thing, lighting is extremely important as it can separate a cheesy poster from a striking poster. Also, honestly speaking, I chose to do a horror movie poster because I thought it would be very easy...Boy was I surprised. I quickly learned that horror posters are quite difficult, as the littlest things can make it look corny. I went through about 6 concepts until I found one that wasn't laughable. From the critiques that I got, I realized that my text should have been a little more striking. While the font and colour were fine, it could have been a bit larger; again, if it was too big though, it would come off as corny...Despite horror being a major pain in the butt, I have to say, it did pay off...even though my intentions were so much. From this, I learned a lot about design, spacing, and colour schemes. All of it has to be near perfect for a horror poster to be truely