The Editing Experience

Adobe photoshop is definitely my comfort zone now. My previous project helped me develop my skills and so, I was able to use and abuse photoshop CS3 for my project. The ancillary tasks were to create a magazine front cover and poster for the trailers that we created. During the filming period, we decided to take mulitple images of Elizabeth in costume as we knew that it will be useful for this task. We worked with the lighting and differnt camera shots/angles to make sure we have a variety of different images available to us. I have included some of these images above.

I was specifically involved in creating the magazine front cover. Before we began creating this, we researched different 'Empire' magazine front covers to understand the conventions used throughout. It was obvious that 'Empire' love to be original and quite oftenly, adapt the concept of the featured title on their front cover. We decided to follow up these conventions and perhaps challenge them if it was appropiate to do so.

During our research we found that 'Empire' magazine used many close up shots of the main character. This was relevant for us because the highlight and understanding of our trailer is heavily based on the eyes of the protagonist. A close up shot of her will be a perfect way to draw attention to the eyes. So we picked an image that we took during the filming period and edited it in photoshop. Firstly, I cropped the image from the background and blended it in with a black background. This denotes that Elizabeth is coming out of the shadows. Much like 'The Grudge,' We wanted to brand our trailer by the protagonists eyes. I was able to whiten and luminate the white eyes to make them look more apparent. In the original image, the actress was not wearing her nitey, we decided to use the brush tool to create the white nitey. This worked really well. I then moved on to airbrushing the actress's skin to create a more professional presentation. The lips were soft in colour and therefore I blended a bit of colour into it to again, create a more professional and airbrushed look.

After working on the image, we concentrated on the text that we wanted to include. We started by looking at a typical 'Empire' Template. We used the same masthead to keep it similar. We smoothed out the masthead as it was pixelated when we added the layer. Thereafter created more layers to include text around the image. We also adapted the theme of our trailer as we used the font (open classic) when presenting the movie title and tagline above the masthead.

After this, I created a kind of mist on the black background to combine similarities with the poster and trailer.

All in all, I really enjoyed performing this task.