The document describes Alex Simpson's process for taking photos and manipulating images for a film poster. It discusses taking photos with the draft layout in mind, focusing on the protagonist with one background figure. The best photos showed good lighting and facial expressions conveying vulnerability. Photo manipulation involved separating subjects from the background, blurring the man's face, and adding effects to create a darker, thriller-like feel by adding noise, brush strokes, and repositioning the characters.

1. Photo Shoot and Image
Manipulation
Alex Simpson

2. Photo-shoot
When taking the images for my film poster, I did it with the draft layout I
decided to use in mind. Originally I wanted their to be more then one blanked
face figure in the background, when it actually came to taking the images I
felt it looked more ascetically pleasing with one blank figure, as it allowed the
focus to be more on our protagonist. I also felt that I would be able to play
around with the blank figure, making him appear more domineering.

3. Best Photo’s
All in all I think that the two best photos that I took are the two shown below. I think
this because the lighting in these two shots are good and don’t cover up the face of
the protagonist which was a prominent issue in the other two shots. I also think the
representation of the protagonist is good in these shots. I wanted our character Emma
to be shown as being vulnerable which is mainly shown through her facial expression.
In terms of colour Amy is wearing a green dress which she wore in the teaser trailer in
a specific scene were she meets her mysterious lover. By her wearing the same dress it
creates a sense of continuity between the two promotional pieces. In the end I
decided to go with IMG_4051. This is because I felt that the positioning of the man in
background was better and that our protagonists facial expressions were more clear in
the way that they showed fear.

4. Photo Manipulation
The photo manipulation stage did take a lot longer then expect, this is due to
me learning new techniques within photo shop that I hadn’t experienced
before. Below is a general flow of pictures in which show how I got to my final
manipulated image.
This was my starting image, no manipulations had
taken place.
With the use of the magic wand tool, I
separated my two characters from the
white background which was in the
previous photo. I then went around
each character to make sure that not
signs of the previous background could
be found. Ensuring a high quality.

5. Photo manipulation continued
Next I blurred out the male characters face as I didn’t want
him to have any known identity. I did this by masking
around his head with the magnetic lasso tool and adding
field blur which was found in the filter tab on photo shop.
In the final stage of my photo manipulation I made a
small number of changes to give the image the more
darker and thriller like feel I wanted. To start with I
added a background to the image. I did this by
inserting a grey still and adding a noise filter to it.
This created a noise like background. I also added a
slight brush stroke known as sumi-e which made the
characters more contrast and depth. Finally I
changed the positioning of each character to make
the male character look more threatening. I did this
by separating the two characters using the magnetic
lasso tool and putting them on different layers. This
allowed me to adjust the scale and positioning of
each character.