Contexts of Practice BCOP100 - 21st October

Wednesday 21st October 2015

Course Module - BCOP100                     Contexts of Practice                    Lecture - Lucy Leake 

Nothingness - Designing posters 

Today at the start of the lesson we started to recap on non-places and we were given a brief to pair of, use our photographs of non-place and to create a few concepts of posters. Since I had my photographs we decided to use mine to create some sort of horror poster, I wanted to experiment using photoshop to re-create my photographs in a spooky way, we went with the theme of woodlands as I had taken a few images from Buckland Abbey which is where I work. 

Photo's used

The above photographs were taken using my phone and a Nikon DSLR camera. Photos taken by Luke Curno (PCA Student) - October 2015

I was really pleased with the final products for our poster designs as when it came to showing them, a lot of people liked the opacity and how we had used a photograph of water as a mist/fog trail for through the woodlands. I really loved experimenting with the brightness, Hue's - Saturation and just the way that we could layer images on-top of each other to give a mirror effect, whilst using specific parts of the photographs and resizing them to symbolise water, clouds, trees, mountains etc. 

Here were a few examples that we managed to create. 

Poster 1

Layered the pictures on-top of each other, changed the opacity of the images, went online to get the rip effect, used that for the dominant image of the woodland, wanted to impose a reddish blood colour to the sky so as to enhance the posters title and the theme for the film. We used the lasso tool to cut the image out and then the rip effect we pasted over the top with the intention of the image showing through the rip, giving it a rugged edge effect. This worked really well and once faded out it looked distant, spooky and empty. 

This certain woodland once looked at could be argued that it is non-place but from working their myself I know that it hasn't been opened up to the public as such, it is mostly visited by visitors and people who work there. I feel that it is a non-place as not only is it distant (not many people visit), but I feel like the visitors and staff are making and using the space/place as their own, laying flowers, chilling out by the pond and enjoying the glorious walks around Monk's Pathway. This again is why I wanted to use this spot for a horror film as it is deserted, quiet and at times tranquil which would confuse the narrative for the audience who are watching, you wouldn't expect anything to jump out at the camera, builds up tension to certain aspects of the film. 

The quote was positioned dark at the bottom of the page, most people don't notice it at first, you have to take a closer look at the poster, everything starts to make sense and the writing draws you in closer, the quote makes a few people think once it is looked at, there is even a hidden face within the poster, see if you can find it? 

Finally, we looked up existing film posters so as to get some inspiration, ideas to fit our chosen quote (located at the foot of the poster). We used the colour red for the title of the film so as to enhance the colours of the posters dominant images and background colour. 

Poster 2

This poster was a little different, we kind of went with the idea that it is Back to the Future day and we wanted to use the colours and the text for the quote to symbolise that. We started off by using an image that I had taken at Plymouth Railway station, a long shot looking up the railway track. Next thing that we did was to fill up the empty space of the sky, to do this we super imposed another image of a hotel onto the poster, and changed the opacity so that it looked like it was in the distance. 

The font for the quote came out retro style looking which we then tied back to the colours at the train station. We wanted to use the words within the image, so we decided to put the reference for the quote on the yellow line along the walkway, we then faded it out to look like people had walked over it, been using the walkway throughout everyday commutes.

Finally, just like the other poster, we wanted to play around with the contrasts and colours for the poster, we wanted to enhance the bright colours and show some sort of shadow formation as if there was a lot of cloud coverage, all of these colours could then be linked back to the FUTURE.

Here are a few mockups of posters