How to Make a Movie Poster for Your Projects in Photoshop ~ Kriscoart

[Music] hey what's up today we're talking about making a movie poster for your project here's how to make one [Music] okay so here we are we're gonna talk about posters posters of course are a great way to essentially showcase your project invite viewers into viewing your project so it's almost like a business card and a trailer kind of all put in one it needs to essentially grab people and convince them to invest their time into whatever it is that you made kind of like this neon sign that i got um to entice you to go to my website check out my work there and my products but as you can tell it's a bit of a blur right now uh and by the way if you're interested that came from neon mfg they make neon signs both made with actual neon and led which that one is led a huge shout out to them and that's not where the shout outs end because xp pen sent me this this artist pro 15.6 i'm beyond excited for that so shout out to xp pen as well before jumping into the actual doing let's talk a little theory when it comes to posters now first of all posters vary a lot depending on what it is you're trying to communicate so this can be in terms of style so you can have a more you know cartoonish or stylized or punk rock type of poster vibe and you can really play with that style in order to best represent the ideas and the themes that are part of your project but did you also know that there are specific colors that are at this point literally embedded into us in the way that we read movie posters yellow is traditionally used for more indie type of flicks and that is because usually indie productions don't have as big budget as you know hollywood films so they can't be plastered everywhere so they really need to maximize just how they pop uh wherever they are placed so yellow of course that kind of hazardous yellow is um it catches the eye pretty well same goes with action movies that use you know the double exposure effects and the black and white images usually added with some orange elements such as flames and things like that thrillers which usually use more blue and all this and i could go on but fortunately there's already a video that goes on with a person that is actually in the industry making posters making movie posters and does an excellent job of breaking that down on vanity fair so they actually go over these sort of genres that were built for posters i think that colors and all of that even though there are these sort of standards at the end of the day that doesn't really matter because um you know if your movie has a certain color palette or certain ideas that you want to communicate in a different way then you can you know feel free to do that instead of having to stick to what has been done with other films that might be in a similar genre most of the projects that i've done movie posters for actually pretty much all of them are not feature length theatrical releases films and something that i've done on my website even just for aesthetic reasons and also to give that feeling that these projects are bigger than just a youtube video is giving this movie poster format and it's just another way for you to think of your project in the most reductive way possible which is one frame one image with titles or whatever but what can we do to best summarize and represent your project in a way that is interesting and enticing and that's essentially what movie posters are but then the other step to this once you've kind of found your style of how are you planning on capturing what you're trying to show on the poster meaning is it a still that you can extract from your project or is it a photo shoot that you actually have to go and do in order to get these materials that you need for your poster that is something that you should be kind of aware of even in the filming process because if you're thinking about your poster just like a thumbnail and you can quickly grab that still that can be perfectly curated to to work as a thumbnail as a poster then definitely do that well you can do it as a quick one-photo quick grab while you're on set with the actors and costumes rather than having to schedule for that later which can get very expensive and then another thing when it comes to grabbing this material and evolving it is to kind of this might sound very vague but it's to inject that bigger than life feeling into this one still and that mostly comes from what you're choosing what you're picking from but also there's a lot of things that you can do in photoshop to really curate all these elements to work towards that feeling so okay we've done a lot of this let's get to drawing i want to show you one of my one of the breakdowns that i've done for a short film that you guys seem to have really enjoyed it was once in a lifetime so let's jump into photoshop and let's combine all these different elements to get this final result here we are into photoshop let's get right into this so i'm going to start with a still from the project itself and i think that this is kind of cool you can go two directions with this as i mentioned you can go it's very stylized so you can even maybe trace over stills of of your project but in this case we're gonna be building on top of that with uh just photoshop elements and making it all postery so what does that mean we'll find out right now so the very first things that i like to experiment with is trying to find my frame so i know that uh right off the bat what we can see here is that we have these really strong visual imagery at the very end of the short which is you know nice framing it's it's pretty balanced and next steps that i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be adding that same instance of that image over and over so that i can add more foreground elements in this case more sand now there is one other foreground element that i wanted to isolate and that is this sort of mask element here and you can see that i'm using the content aware fill tool and this is great because we can actually not just do a one click and done type of situation but we can actually go into this other content aware fill editor where we can select certain areas that we want to make sure that the program is taking into account to replace in our case these uh feet that are still part of our image so this green sort of tint overlay is telling you the areas of the image that it is sampling in order to replace the parts of the image that you don't want which are currently selected that's what that is and you can see that it does a very good job here at cleaning that up and then i'm just gonna add a very simple you know map so that we can non-destructively kind of pull back that layer and start to erase in a very smooth way in a very feathered way a little bit of that edge so that it blends with our other layers below it i'm gonna duplicate that layer and i'm gonna try to isolate just the mask element so you can see here that i'm just roughly painting that out and it doesn't have to be super super precise because again we have that other layer that also has the mask below it since it was a duplicate copy but the reason why i'm trying to isolate the mask is so that i can apply different adjustments to the bottom layer of that copy so that it just affects the sand so i can match it better with the rest of the foreground sand and then i have another duplicate version of that which i can then just focus on the mask in terms of adjustments and really making that stand out as i want so there we go just adding a little bit of vignetting just to get a sense of how that looks and making some adjustments in the clouds here just by erasing them and i'm just going to be doing a full sky replacement here just because i don't have enough room from the original shot since of you know the letterbox cropping and all of that i don't have the full uh real estate that i need to expand that sky in this vertical format so i'm just going to replace it entirely with a sunset that matches the vibe matches the short film and i'm going to just make some quick adjustments to this image as i bring it in i'm just doing some very basic color correction just some some minor adjustments to get really the most out of this image and bring it really close as close as i can in this stage to what the poster should look like another thing that i have to do is kind of eliminate these areas here you can see that i'm using the content aware too which does a pretty rough job in this case since it's harder to tell what these elements are but um you know it's it's fine because i can go back and do some further cleanup with the stamp tool and so there we go we're starting to get pretty close to something that looks uh you know like a frame now we can really work on sweetening this and bringing it close with all those details that we need such as you know adding the stock image of footprints so that we can you know we can highlight a little bit more of the story that's going on and linking these elements a bit further together such as this mask in the foreground you know the the footsteps are connecting it to the characters in the scene so that we can kind of assume that you know they're connected in the story or that this mask belonged to one of those characters this also helps a lot with adding a little bit of a subtle sense of leading lines it's not you know super obvious because these are footsteps in the sand and the sand is already pretty rough in texture so they don't really stand out too much but it's just another element to sort of guide the eye from this very prominent foreground element of this mask all the way leading us to the center frame where our subjects are speaking of that roughness just to make those footsteps stand out i'm going to add another stock image layer of sand which is a little bit less rough with a little bit less footprints since it seems like this beach was quite traveled and you know we're just smoothing things out color correcting this new element and blending that in so that we can make those like sand impressions stand out even more then from here i'm just going to clean up our subjects a little bit since they are having some artifacts and just some leftover spill from uh the the mask that we did earlier so i'm just doing some very basic cleanup with uh with the brush here not nothing too complicated again just going into that matte side of that layer so that i can again non-destructively erase what i need and uh you know i've mentioned this many times but if you're new to photoshop you know these black and white values that you can use in the mats of all these layers are really helpful because you're painting in again black and white values so you can paint back white or black depending on what you want to erase or keep in and it's much different than you know using the eraser tool doing a bunch of steps to where you can't control z anymore and now that information of that layer is lost another thing that i'm doing here is i'm adding this image of a color palette that i picked and although this isn't what the final poster colors will look like at all i actually decided to completely flip the look of the colors near the end but having a color palette even if it's not exactly what you want in the end it's still nice to kind of start to bring all of the colors into cohesive groups which you can later you know shift a few of them and it should all fairly work uh together you know even if you change your mind later on but at least you're starting to bring in all these millions of colors into more defined groups of shades and so you can see that i'm doing that simply by adding a solid color sending it to soft light and you know you can use other blending modes such as overlay hard light screen depending on what you're doing whether it's highlights or shadows and you can sort of add these solid colors and paint them in you know lower the opacity and in a very subtle way little by little stack them on top to bring in those colors uh together into the color palette that you choose you can see another nice little trick again just by using a copy and this time sending it to screen is to add a little bit of an edge lighting to our subjects to match the color of the sunset or in this case this kind of like pinkish tone which again is pretty ugly which is why i changed it in the end but for now you know the point is that we're hard edge lighting them and that's a really good thing to do with subjects in a poster just to make them stand out from the background and give them a little bit more of a sense of three dimension and i'm gonna keep adding solids from that color palette this time i'm gonna go more towards the horizon and i'm gonna add sort of that layer of haze or fog that you can often see when you're looking out straight into the ocean or you know straight into any kind of landscape and there's a little bit of a fall off but in our case this is more for adding color and sort of these nice defined layers of color to our background and again adding colors in this sort of way can be pretty interesting because you can again use even the the magic wand selection tool to get these really interesting shapes and create different masks and sort of subtract and add colors to also other parts of your image to create you know other interesting layers of texture and again bring that cohesion together from all the way to the sky to the subjects to the ground and every other element that is part of our poster so i'm going to speed right through all of this you can see that i'm just adding more and more colors just you know the more that you can spend time with this and and really fine tune it the better and then from there i'm going to play a little bit with the luminance values of of this poster so where do we want more brightness more darkness and this can be done very effectively in sort of the same method with overlays of color or simply brightness and conscious adjustments and using that map from from the adjustment itself to sort of paint in where you want it darker or where you want the adjustment to show up more or less and you can see here that i'm carrying that same idea of sort of highlighting and edge lighting what matters in the scene with the mask over here adding more detail just by simply roughly painting in uh you know these uh these elements that are still true to the colors that i've picked in the color palette now here you can see that from the highlights i've started to move a little bit to the shadows so i'm now adding the darker range of colors from my palette into the scene so that i can paint in a little bit of shadows and you know add a little bit of an interest that way again this color combination this look could work for some posters maybe some type of other project uh it doesn't honestly match with the vibe and even the colors that were present in the short film um and it's making it feel a little bit too like romantic like yeah so that's why i kind of decided to really roll back on this look but for the sake of this tutorial let's just finish it up and one last thing that i want to show you here which is really really cool is once you add a text in here something that i like to do is paint in all these little details and these little kind of highlights and then once you set them to a different transfer mode you can see that they add just a little something to the text just to bring it more to life and making it seem a little bit less standard than just regular inserted text [Music] so since we're talking about making posters well sometimes you need textures and assets to make those posters extra fancy and for that we have today's sponsor yellow images and i've done some really exciting collaborations with them in the past and their assets in their marketplace has contributed to some really fun photoshop work and even some experimentation with new creative styles and yellow images is one of my favorite places i go to whenever i need mock-ups or crazy assets like these 360 post-apocalyptic vehicles and buildings that were featured in one of my last map paintings two creative fonts that can instantly elevate your titles and even include some assets some different patterns and textures or even brushes that you can use for photoshop and more you have some great quality assets that can get you started actually over 40 000 of them so check out yellow images it's honestly a lot of fun to just scroll and browse and see what they have a lot of times i find myself feeling inspired from some of the assets and thinking of kind of like larger concepts that can make use of those assets so definitely check them out and by the way they're also offering to you and anyone else watching this video a 20 off discount if you use the code crisco r20 so check them out link is in the description really love them and i think you will too i hope you enjoyed this this breakdown i i know it's very unusual than our usual like tutorials and filmmaking stuff but this is also a big part of it a lot of times as creatives we're so invested into the process of making the thing that we sometimes forget what needs to happen after once you publish the thing once you actually are trying to push it out to people so that some people could care about what you did and actually view all the effort that you've put into this project so i hope this helps i hope that it is it has inspired you to you know to create your own posters it's honestly just fun and also by the way a great tool that can help you in making posters is this new pack that i launched so here's a little bit of self promo but i think you're gonna like this one this new pack is called shadows and it's a bunch of shadows now why would you want to buy a bunch of shadows well there's actually a lot of uses for shadows you can instantly add for example an interesting layer of texture to a graphic that you're creating or to even a poster itself and i've actually used this to even enhance the lighting and the cinematography of my shots so for example if we take a look at this before and after you can see that the walls here are pretty bland there's not a lot of art direction on there so just by adding you know a layer of shadows from these blinds in the background it really helps elevate the whole thing and i think it really makes a huge difference and of course this is just one way of using them but uh yeah just a just a quick and easy trick especially for low budget shooters and it helps a ton with the channel and keeping things going because [Music] it's not easy but yeah uh that is it for me for this video definitely consider checking out those packs your support means a ton but of course you don't have to spend a dime all you can do is also like this video subscribe if you haven't thank you so much for watching my name is chris trini for chris guar and i'll see you next time into my life

Channel: Kriscoart

Views: 42,241

Keywords: filmmaking, vfx, kriscoart, kris Truini, after, effect, premiere, pro, epic, cinematic, photoshop, vanity fair, movie poster photoshop, movie posters, movie poster collection, photoshop tutorial, movie poster, movie poster design, movie poster design in photoshop, movie poster photoshop tutorial, movie poster frame

Id: O3OFYatKGNM

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020