Closed WIPs

by **ctaulbee** » Oct Fri 03, 2014 12:08 am

This cover was requested after reading the IMDB link it looked interesting so I searched out the film in order to watch it, as I don't much like making covers for films I've never seen.

I was not too bad so upon further research I found it had only been released on Blu in the UK by Studiocanal there is a limited theater release in the US but no one has been named to do a disc release yet and may not so this cover will be a Region B cover not really a big deal they are similar and since I don't have a template for Studiocanal done and will have to make the whole thing from scratch I'm going with the 3173 size as it will likely be a Vortex case over there anyway.

After looking at the art there was a fair amount of high res images even though it's not a headlining release, I picked these two stills as the film mainly focuses on these three characters there is little or limited interaction with other characters throughout.

This will be the main keyart, it's pretty dark but we can work on that.

And this will be the main back image, after a test fit I have decided it will pretty much fill the back, I will be flipping it horizontally then biasing it to the left to leave room for a vertical stills row on the right but that will be later. Side note on this image and I always look at this with stills (no matter how they are to be used) as they are generally unprocessed by the studio and these are no exception the faces are very dark so that will need to be worked on later when the image processing begins. This is often the case as that and other things are more or less left as taken by the photographer and are issued as promotional tools only which are not really intended to be used 'as is' in finished print ready art, if the studio uses them they will process them at that time.

One other thing to note here--these stills have very little grain added from the studio (a good thing) this is important if you plan to filter them much, really grainy images will give you bad results depending on what filters or image processing software you use as it tends to interfere with algorithms used to process the raw image data and calculate the changes due to the fact that mathematically the grain just looks like details to the program it can't tell what it is, so less grain is always better. If you can't find a image with little or no grain added and you plan to process it then you should probably use some grain removal filters/techniques first but since I'm not doing that here as these are pretty clean and since that would be a whole different tutorial anyway, I'll leave that for another time.

:-)

I'm going to break this tut down into posts rather than all in one post as it makes the attached images easier to manage and there will be a few.

by **ctaulbee** » Oct Fri 03, 2014 12:57 am

OK, first thing in the actual 'making' process for me is the main front keyart it needs to be how I like it first as it will set the tone for decisions on other elements used on the cover like background, fonts, colors, textures all that, so lets get going shall we.

So it will be processed before it's added to the cover at full size to have as much resolution as possible to work with, filters work better with large images that have lots of good detail.

Need a plan, always best to have a plan on what you are trying to do before you start trying to do it lol, after watching the film and since Viggo is not only the main character in the story he is also the focus of much of the photography, of note here he appears 'disheveled' during much of the film so that is why I originally selected this image as he looks pretty rough in it, now I want enhance it to give it a more grunge/high contrast look.

Number one thing to get corrected first is the dark areas later I will be keying it back up with high contrast but to begin with we want it leveled. To do that I'm using a contrast mask first that balances out the light and dark areas (you can Google 'contrast mask' to get some tuts on how to do that) then I'm using Photomatix to bring up the details some, this is all part of the pre-processing as you can see since Photomatix is intended for HDR photo processing it has altered the colors quite a bit. I'm not concerned with that right now, remember colors can be changed, what I'm looking for here is balance light to dark only, you can add a B&W adjustment layer that you can turn on and off above your image to better see that without being detracted by the colors if you like.

Here I have adjusted the colors down to more neutral tones, I'll be adding colors back later across the whole cover to highlight areas, so it will be best to have a more basic toned image to begin with.

Last step is to go with high contrast to finish the image, for that I'm using Topaz Adjust 5, now you could manually do it with high pass filters and dodge & burn layers if you wanted more control but this works for me and it's a lot easier lol.

by **ctaulbee** » Oct Fri 03, 2014 1:08 am

We are now ready to begin the the cover, since the image has lots of detail and contrast I want a background that is more flat with some light texture and highlights, don't want the background to be 'busy' that would clash with the imagery.

I picked this stock high res image then adjusted the color palette on it to match the keyart I just finished to get this.

Now I can place, scale down and position my main image on the front, then add a layer mask and blend it to get this, see how the tones match--keyart to BG, this will make it easier to adjust the colors later as instead of adding color layers to each image layer separately and trying to match them, which is hard to do, this way I can just add color/texture layers above the whole composite image (with masks where needed) and they will affect the entire cover the same due to the base images all having the same color range/tone to begin with.

Next I added the back keyart, it only gets basic processing mostly just removing the blue sky, overall lightening/desaturating it and then masking it in, oh and I worked on the faces remember the earlier note, faces are always important in all aspects whether it be main images or stills we want to see face detail in most all cases. Also a single color layer has been added here to see how the whole composite is responding to color shifts.

You will notice there is a lot of white all around the cover now, this is due to the light coming from the left side of his face, I want to highlight that, after the color is added in the next step some of that will be masked out as it's on a separate layer, best to keep things on their own layers never modify an image unless you have to as later adjustment would be impossible if that were added to a specific layer.

by **ctaulbee** » Oct Fri 03, 2014 1:44 am

Now for some color/texture layers, there are a few color/texture layers here in different blend modes, I like to go bold on colors/textures to begin with, to better see what areas pick up on what colors/textures plus this makes masking of the color/texture layers easier to remove or lighten the effect in order to bring it all into overall balance, also some of the white has been masked out now so it is becoming more of a accent and not a focus.

Time for final adjustments now to bring the image down to it's final state, this will pretty much be the final cover key art, less minor adjustments needed to allow for text or other things if necessary.

Like this--see the area below his feet, I know there will be text down there so I'm adding another light/texture layer in there to get rid of some of the detail that way it won't conflict with any text later, I picked white for here because it allows me to bring that white light source I have added starting from his face and extend it across the back of the cover framing the back image in because if you look that back image has a bright light source on the right side and it ends up looking like this:

by **ctaulbee** » Oct Fri 03, 2014 2:05 am

For the title and front text I went with a sans serif font since they used the same basic style on the posters but I did choose a grunge version not splatter grunge but a more subtle grunge to compliment the grunge nature of the cover and then picked a dark color that would again not clash with the color palette but still have nice contrast I also finished the spine while I was doing titles keeping the same color for those logos, I don't like too much shift in colors on fonts because if you get too many colors going on, then things start to look really busy/abstract which to me equals 'random & unplanned' and I always want things to look deliberate because ...well they are lol.

The stills were a bit of a challenge on this one as they all have a green tint which does not work for me, also they have varying exposures and saturation, one plus is they are all high quality with hardly any grain, so they are clean and crisp.

After making some little stills frames and getting all the images corrected and matched, I have made it to this point...

Here is a close-up of the full-sized stills row as you can see they are very clean, I like clean stills whenever possible, of course that depend on whether high quality images are available to begin with.

by **ctaulbee** » Oct Fri 03, 2014 2:27 am

Next I like to get the legals out of the way, since this is not a template cover I looked at several Studiocanal retail backs, they don't really have a specific layout per se but they do include certain elements so I used that as a basic guideline to build the legal area, now this is a region B cover but I refuse to include the big-assed ugly rating box they have on those releases, to me that is like the bar-codes, they just in most cases look ugly as f%^k and I would never put a rating logo on the front either, my god what were they thinking, so I included a small rating logo (color adjusted lol) in the legals and that is it.

Next was the credits and bonus for the credits on this one I wanted to keep them in a 'box' so I spent some time formatting them in order to have them justified nicely in a neat little square, I went without the double stacked credit text as I like the more traditional look most of the time and since this film was suppose to be set in the 60's it seemed to fit, the bonus features again used a basic sans serif font but non-grunge don't want to mix to many font styles either in my opinion that just looks gaudy and unthought out.

Again for the synopsis same font style, I don't like all caps for a synopsis makes them hard to read, synopsis' should always be clean fonts and easy to read (ie good contrast) with nice upper and lowercase letters, I used a slightly darker shade of the same text/logo color I have been using for it as I like to set it apart just ever so slightly from the rest of the text on the back and call attention to it. After making the path and getting it placed their was a space above the stills, could have added quote or tag there but this film does not have a tagline that I could find, it does have several 4 star ratings though so I just went with that in a light tone so as not to have it stand out too much and there you have it the finished product.

And the final product in a case preview...