The Student.

This past week, we were ordered to create a masterpiece movie poster for a hypothetical movie called “The Student.” Although the stated goal was to inspire creativity into our projects, I think Twitchell’s real goal was to get free graphic design for his upcoming blockbuster of the same name.

Anyway, about my poster… the design process consisted of every other design project I have ever done: creating a canvas with the correct dimensions (18×24 @ 300dpi). After that, I went to look for inspiration at some of the links provided. I saw this tutorial for a “Trendy Typographic Poster Design“. After seeing this, I started creating text around the canvas with the word “STUDENT” many times, at 45° angles, in different sizes. After creating that, I took an old image and placed it behind the 45 text layers and did 3 gaussian blurs with a 255px radius. Then I cloned out most of the overly bright areas of the blur, then blurred it again. After that, I desaturated the image to create this:

At the time, I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to create a documentary, or a horror movie. I kinda decided to go with an ominous-documentary. I added a texture, a free one found on Flickr, of concrete to give it a more distressed look. I also changed the blend mode of the text group to soft light, this made it so that the text fit in with the background.

The next part that I added was text at the bottom. First, I added a semi-transparent black rectangle at the bottom half of the canvas. From there, I added the title, and other text relating to the movie. On the main title, I duplicated the text layer, rasterized it, and added a mild motion blur to give effect to the text, and make it stand out. I then turned down the opacity of the blur to make it less prominent. The credits, which use the font “SF Movie Poster“, at the bottom read:

SCOTT STURGES PICTURES, IN ASSOCIATION WITH STURGES PHOTOGRAPHY, PRESENTS THE FILM “THE STUDENT” FEATURING STEPHEN STURGES AND BRANDON DESIMONE. WITH CASTING BY BRUCE TWITCHELL. DIRECTED BY SCOTT STURGES VISIT WWW.STURGESPHOTO.COM FOR DETAILS.

I also added a MPAA rating. I found this vector image on Wikipedia, and it is under the GPL license. I converted the SVG to a raster format with Inkscape, and imported it into the poster. Lastly, I signed my image with my fancy new Wacom tablet.

The last part of the design was to shoot the photo to go in the main portion of the poster. I knew that I wanted to have an image of a student with books scattered around them, doing something relating to the subject of the photo.

I went downtown with Stephen, went to a narrow alley way, in a slightly shady area of town, with many of my school books and strobes. Stephen had some coffee with him, so I felt that it defined his character. I scattered my books around him, and behind him. I placed a flash in front of him, as I was shooting into the sun, and wanted to make sure that his face was visible.

I took several images from behind, however, after looking at them, I decided that I like the ones from this angle better. So I fired off quite a few, and settled on this one. When I saw it on camera, I knew that this would be the best.

The process for processing this image involved processing the RAW image, doing a little sharpening, and finally working it into the image. I intentionally oversaturated and sharpened the image, as I feel that when it is printed, it would look best with green grass and blue skies. I really like how this image turned out, and Stephen actually wants it for his Facebook.

My inspiration for this poster came from a number of sources, as well as pure creativity from myself. I have already posted one link to the site where I got the idea to use diagonal text for the background, but I also a tutorial called “Create an Intense Movie Poster“. Although the connection is not necessarily there, this tutorial really got me rolling on the project. I do not think, however, that it has any actual influence on any of my current poster though. Finally, I have some obvious inspiration from every movie poster that I have seen in the last few years, as I don’t think I could have had a good idea of what a movie poster should look like without seeing some.

Below are the contact sheets for the images used for this poster, if you blow them up, you can see the different angles that I took photos from to try and get the final image.

Technical Information

• Camera: Canon 50D
• Lens: Canon 28-135mm (Just received back from Canon repair center!)
• Lighting: Canon 430EX triggered with Cybersync
• Shot in RAW, processed with Photoshop CS4