This is a film poster for a film about domestic violence I tried to convey all ranges of emotions in the poster. The first thing I did was to Look for friends to help me with a photoshoot and makeup.

Fig 1.0

The first thing I did was to place my smart guides. I created a custom grid to place all the visual elements required for the poster and placed the main image as a background image to use for the poster. I proceeded to create a mask over the layer and used the gradient tool to give it a partial vignette filter.

Fig 1.1

I thought about the visual hierarchy of the poster and I realized that the two main elements of the poster will be the background image of the main character April played by Alana Musa and the title of the film. So I put the movie title in a San-serif typeface called “Gothic Joker” which was the main typeface used in the recent film about the Joker. The title SCAR was written in red colour.

Fig 1.2

The next step of the design process was to make a composite image that encompasses the title of the film and also a reflection of the main character, So I made a copy of the background layer which is the main image, and mirrored the image with the flip feature and used the clipping mask feature in Adobe Photoshop to place the flipped image into the SCAR text. I used a hue and saturation adjustment filter to get the color to be the correct shade of red.

Fig 1.3

Typography was a very huge part in giving the design an overall cohesion, using the grids I initially created, I lined up the main guest stars in the film using contrast in type font-weight between the first name and last name. And just below that, I used laurels to emphasize the film awards in a vertical grid. This was used to balance the two sides of the poster, on the left we have one element which is the film title ‘SCAR’ and on the right, we have the cast and awards to give the design a sense of visual balance. For this, a san serif typeface was used called “bebas Neue”.

Fig 1.4

The next major element that was added to the poster was the billing block which is the industry standard for formatting movie poster credits, for this used a typeface called “tall dark and handsome”. I used the idea of contrast when formatting this section, I used contrast in size as well as weight to convey the message.

Fig 1.5

Rounding up the poster, more visual hierarchical elements were added into the poster, first was the movie premiere date which was in a san-serif typeface earlier used “bebas neue” and in a red font color to give it a high contrast and give it better overall visibility.

Other elements like the critique quote were placed in a typeface called “papyrus” which was introduced by the Netflix logo.

ALTERNATIVE DESIGN

For the alternative poster, the concept I was using was double exposure, the challenge was trying to blend two different images to form an overall composite image. To do this, I layered the two images on each other and used blending modes to create the effect, on the bottom image I used the “lighter color” blending mode, and on the foreground image I used a mask to remove a bit of the image using the gradient tool, creating this Silhouette look and feel. The double exposure was to capture the duality of her emotions in the movie story where she was once happy and now due to physical abuse everything changed. The final thing was to desaturate the image of the main subject to give the design a high contrast.