This document summarizes the process of creating a poster for a music video. It begins with establishing a white background and adding colored strips. An image of a bmx biker is added along with a title. Effects are tested on different elements to make them more eye-catching. Additional bikes and colors are incorporated based on feedback. Lighting is used carefully when taking the main poster photo to highlight props like an umbrella. The final poster design is completed with positioning adjustments and a yellow background.

1. Poster Production Process

2. This is the starting point, the simple white background is the only layer. This the very beginning when you open a new Photoshop document. From this you can chose to keep this background, change the colour of the background, or delete it completely.

3. I chose to keep the white background because I wanted a light background to represent the light heated, comedy atmosphere of the video. But I did not want a colour that was overly bright, such as yellow or light blue. I had originally planned for background to be light blue, but I changed my mind. As you can see, at this stage I have added a strip at the top and the bottom of the poster. This is to give the poster a structure, rather than it looking abstract and unprofessional. I used the rectangle tool to make the top strip the duplicated it for the bottom strip. The reason why I have chosen to use light blue for the colour of the strips is because it keeps the element of bright colours, which helps to give the poster a less tense impression.

4. At this point, I have added a title to the poster and a black line, edited. The name of the single is ‘The Mandem ft Queen’ . The font I have put the title in is ‘Showcard Gothic’. I have chosen to tilt the title because it gives it the laid back, slightly informal impression, which portrays the mood of the music video, and the group itself. The fact that i put ‘QUEEN’ in black was not very good because black is a dark colour and having it in such a key part of the poster, may have suggested a more gloomy mood of the music video to the reader. The black strip towards the bottom is an feature that I added. I was beginning to create a series of different coloured strips. This strip was also made using the rectangular tool, in the tool bar on the left.

5. The next step was to finish the sequence of colour. I added three strips of colour at the bottom (excluding the blue strip at the bottom because that was already put in place before). I have gone down from a dark colour to a light. I started with black to signify the ‘gangsta’ walk at the beginning of the video, this is why it is at the beginning of the sequence.

6. The difference here compared to the last slide is that I have added the image of a bmx biker silhouette.

7. The green box I have put in is to show the area where the image will be once I have taken it, to place on this poster. I made the green box by adding another layer on Photoshop. I have approximated the area in which the main image will cover, so it is not certain that the image will take up this much room. Unlike most poster images, I am only taking one image, whereby I aim to have all the characters and props in it and place it onto this poster. Most posters have several different images taken and then merged into one on the poster using Photoshop, (the software I have used to make the posters base and effects.

8. I have changed the colour and design of the title. This is because when I asked several people what they thought of my initial title, they claimed it was too basic and didn’t catch the eye. So I needed to change it. I have added an effect called ‘Brevel and emboss’ to make it look more authentic as well as adding a bubble like effect around the outside of the writing, to make the title more eye-catching and electric, whilst keeping a consistency of colours. The bubble effect is called the ‘stroke effect’. The screen shot is from Photoshop software.

9. This is the layer section of the page. The highlighted layer is part of the title. As you can see there are several effects added to this part of the title, because they are listed below the ‘effects’ heading. Drop shadow – Creates a shadow effect around the outside of the object. Not very effective but can make a difference.Bevel and emboss – Similar to a drop shadow but sharpens the outside of the object.Colour Overlay – This fills the inside of the object. It gives it a depth of colour. The fill colour of this particular object is red.Stroke – As I explained on the previous slide, this is used to add a bubble around the object.

10. This is a extreme close up on a section of the title. As you can see the bike is full black, and the title is red and blue. I have attached the biker on the bmx to the title for three reasons.Create a contrast between the different colours.To prevent the poster from looking scattered.The black attached to the red and blue represents the ‘gangster’ scene at the beginning of the video being attached to the comedy scenes of the video.Below is a screen shot of the bike image’slayer. I did this to show that there noEffects currently added to the bike image.

11. Here I have made a few changes. I have added several different effects to the image of the bike, and added more bikes as well. The reason why i have changed the design of the bike image is because during my audience research, many people said that the black biker on the bike was to plain and basic, ‘it needs more to it to make it grab the viewers eye’.So I added more to it. I changed its colour to red and gave it the stroke effect, which is the blue around the outside. The blue and red is so it fits in more and keeps consistency on the poster. On the left is a screen shot of the gradients editor. This allowed me to a gradient of colours to the images. I was hard for me to get it right though and did take quite a long time. If you look at the 2nd bike on top of the ‘FT’ you may see that half of the inside filling is red, and half is blue. This apparently was a genius effect i had discovered and i did it using the gradient tool, as well as my initiative to change the colours of the gradient to what I desired.

12. Here I have added a third bike and used the effect of the gradient tool to used my new found effect well. However, on this third bike I have also added a gradient to the stroke, around the outside of the image. This way I have advanced my skills even further.

14. This image is similar to the image I plan to have on my poster, in terms of props, positioning and layout. The way in which the characters are placed and the use of props is how i want my poster image to be. Additionally, I plan to have a few guitars in the image.

15. As you can see I have added some text to the poster. The text in blue is the release date of the DVD, when the DVD would be released if it was a real media product. As I planned the date would be in blue. I have added a patterned gradient around the outside. This was hard to make and took a lot of time. It is effective and eye catching. It may be hard to read from here but in full size it is legible.

16. More editing has been done to the positioning and I have added the main image and the image of the DVD pack. The main image was taken with a lot of lighting and this was mainly to use the umbrella prop to is full use. We had to position the lights in particular place to get the effective reflection of colours that we wanted with the interior of the umbrella. It is visible to see the colours of orange and red, shining inside the umbrella.

17. We were very fond of the umbrella idea from the beginning of the project and this is mainly because we had not yet seen it used before. The colours that the characters are wearing are bright colours. We did this to use the mise-en-scene of the poster to represent the lightened atmosphere of the music video. The fire extinguisher was included just for a sense of randomness.

18. Red appears a lot in the main image. This is because it is one of the main house colours. Yellow is the other house colour of the project but there is already enough yellow on the poster so we stopped any of the characters wearing yellow for this photo shoot.

19. This is the final production of the poster. Once again elements of the poster have been edited. I got rid of the back part of the DVD cover because, as the poster is an advertisement of the DVD album, I did not want to reveal too much of the DVD. I have changed the position of the title slightly. The final background colour I chose was yellow and this was to catch the eye of the viewer initially.