For this project, I was to come up with a concept for a sci-fi movie and make its promotional poster. The movie's premise is where it is discovered that ducks are actually aliens who have been on earth longer than humans have, and they are now taking over. I call it "Fowl Invasion."
After a sketching process which left me with ten roughs, I decided to go with my fourth sketch for the poster. I used an instructor-provided billing block file which I modified to include names I came up with.
The poster was to be a composite image of at least four photos, shown above.
Image Credits (L-R):
Photo by Vijay Vinoth from Pexels
This was my first time working with a PSB file, and it was difficult! The poster's concept was to have a starry background, flames below, and a duck's face in a duck egg.
In the poster file I placed the starry background image (later given a slight Gaussian blur and transformed to be shorter) and the billing block I had modified from the provided file. For the flames, I opened the image and made a selection of everything except for the background, from which I defined a new brush. I used layer masks to isolate the egg I was going for, and then I made a copy of this mask which I slightly modified and then applied to the duck image.
When dealing with the flames layer, I set orange and red background colors and then tweaked some settings in the Brush Settings panel; these included Size Jitter, Angle Jitter and Foreground/Background Jitter. I then did a bit of painting in the lower part of the image, where I wanted the flames to rise.
The duck-in-egg piece was somewhat tricky, given the power required to work with the 27" x 40" PSB file. After some trial and error in the process of achieving the effect I wanted, this element came out as a three-layer group, with an egg-shaped layer mask on each of them. The bottom of the three was an egg layer with 100% opacity and blending mode of Normal. On top of this was the duck itself with a Levels adjustment, a blending mode of Linear Burn, an Outer Glow effect, and an opacity of 71%. The topmost layer of this group was another egg, this one with a Hue blending mode and an opacity of 68%. After this set was completed, I decided that it needed to be slightly larger, and in came the issue of Scratch Disks...
Once this was resolved and the group resized, it was time to add the text: movie title, two stars' names, and a tagline. I used Lucida Sans Typewriter (bold and regular) and applied a Bevel & Emboss effect, to give the text a sort of spacey glow.
