Kollege Ketchup: Photoshop! Part 1: The Movie Poster

As part of my final college year, I took a course exclusively focused on the program that started it all, even before my Blender work: Photoshop! 

My first assignment was to create a superhero or science fiction movie poster. I decided to go wild with this (in part because I was actually making a movie at the time), and the result is possibly the most references since a college self-portrait 6 years ago. Here we go: 

A poster with an upside-down sky and sea, with a massive list of names associated with the apocryphal movie.
  • The cast noted is based on the proposed cast of Superman Lives (I was originally going to make a fan poster for that, but my concept had to be original)
  • The title, "Incursion Point," is a reference to ABYDOS: Incursion
  • Not sure why I chose Paramount or Spyglass as the producers; maybe the latter was a nod to Sixth Sense, or maybe it wasn't
  • "Valtapaz Videos" is Turbulence's "company"
  • Kenji Kawai is a reference to the Ultraman works he fantastically scored, including Ultraman Nexus and Ultraman Zero: The Movie
  • Nathan Furst is the composer of the original BIONICLE movie trilogy
  • Jimmie Haskell scored the original Land of the Lost
  • Stan Lee ('nuff said!)
  • Gen Urobuchi was the screenwriter for Kamen Rider Gaim, one of the long-running series' more well-received entries (even if I haven't finished it...)
  •  Terry Shakespeare directed the BIONICLE movie trilogy. 

For some reason I thought it had more references than that... Oh yeah, 09/07 was another Land of the Lost reference: the first episode aired on September 7, 1974. Anyway, there are a couple of other Incursion influences (including green lights and a ghostly figure of myself taken straight from the footage), but I admit I was mostly after making a cool poster. (In case anyone's wondering, the custom machine was Blender, made to distinguish the poster from a horror or fantasy genre).

Making this was interesting; I could make a fairly creative-looking background with some blended lights and a ghostlike being, but it ended up looking far too simple, so I (over?) compensated with the machine and stylized title. Awkwardly, I ran into an issue where saving as a layer-enabled PDF and back as a PSD flattened the image, giving me a hard lesson to make backups, which I follow to this day with my Blender projects (thankfully, I was able to resume from a very early draft). 

This was a very fun project, and while it took a few drafts I quite like the end result! I'll follow up with a post on my other three projects; hope to post back soon!

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