Tutorial for Truthful Movie Poster (Dumb in 90 Minutes)

Here’s my tutorial for my attempt at a truthful movie poster.

1. Even though I’m beyond raw with Photoshop, I still stuck with it for this work. Call me stubborn.

2. The polygonal lasso (PL) was definitely my go-to tool–it allows me to easily outline around a number or letter and thus isolate a particular space.

3. I started with the PL and outlined the 6 in “60.” My first goal was to rotate the 6 to create a 9, and there’s probably a way to do this easily. Instead, I first copy/pasted the area to create a duplicate 6, which I moved to the side. I used the Edit, Transform, Rotate tool to then turn this copy into a 9. I re-selected the area around the original 6, and used the Brush Tool to fill it in with black. Then I moved over the 9 I’d just created and positioned it just so. Pretty easy.

4. One move I had to keep making as I did this work was Layer, Flatten Image. Each time you copy and paste a section in Photoshop, you essentially create a new layer. Experts get really good at moving between layers to control/adjust elements, but I’m a total rookie and it was easier for me to just flatten the layers out each time so I was just working with one canvas. I’m sure what I just wrote would drive knowledgeable Photoshop folks crazy and reveals my total n00bness.

5. Using this select-copy-paste-flatten process, I was able to move copies of existing letters to the dark area on the left and perform operations in order to create new letters. Creating most of the new letters was pretty easy. I used the PL tool to highlight areas and then copy/paste them into new places, or fill them with color instead. Zooming in helped, and I used the Clone Stamp tool to copy some of the gritty weathered look. Once a new letter passed the “glance test” I moved on.

6. The major challenge was M. All of the letters provided were the same width, so this took some playing around. My first attempt began with an N, and I copied the rightward slanting middle stoke to serve as the last stroke in the new letter. This ended up as looking out of place, something like “N\” if you can imagine that. I decided this wouldn’t be good enough, that I basically need to build a new letter out of the raw material of an N. This took a lot of copy-paste and finessing until it looked okay.

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Remix #3 (Design): Dumb in 90 Minutes (Truthful Movie Poster)

I definitely wanted to give this assignment a try–the challenge (as Lindsay points out)–is generating humor with the remix. Is my effort funny? We shall see.

Which film to choose? The one that came to mind immediately was Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), a Nicholas Cage / Angelina Jolie matinee film. Here’s the original movie poster:

One big mea culpa is necessary here: I have not seen this film. But twelve years ago, when the movie arrived in theaters, I remember thinking that it looked pretty mindless, and that a snarky film reviewer might use “Dumb in 90 Minutes” as the title of a negative review. (For what it’s worth, Rotten Tomatoes scores the film at 25%–a certified rotten score–which is pretty bad.)

And so here’s my remix:

The work took probably three or four hours all told, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The most difficult work came in creating new letters. U, B, T and I weren’t so tough, but I struggled with M. My first version had the second leg of the M at an odd angle that looked really jarring, so I spent probably an hour tweaking an N into something better. I think you have to look closely now to notice the amateurish work. Check out my tutorial for more details.

I guess someone could quibble that the film actually clocks in at closer to two hours… but it looks like most reviewers would have liked it to be shorter. 🙂

Tutorial for One-Man Play (Son, How’s Your Day?)

My attempt at a one-man play was a pretty entertaining and generally pain-free task.

1. After some brainstorming, I settled on a scene from The Breakfast Club–I really wanted to do something from popular film. (When I do this assignment again, it’s going to be this scene from A Few Good Men…).

2. I found the script from the scene easily enough, by just typing in a few lines of the scene’s dialogue into Google.

3. I downloaded and installed Audacity, hit record, and gave the scene a shot. I was fairly satisfied with the quality of my reading after a couple of takes.

4. I used Audacity’s help feature to figure out how to Amplify certain phrases (i.e., turn up the volume) and Cut some of the empty spaces. This was very easy to do.

5. It was so easy, that I figured I’d go ahead and try to create an Autotuned version of my reading. This resulted in about two hours of downloading the wrong plug-ins to Audacity. I finally got the correct download installed so that the Autotune feature showed up in the Effects toolbar. I fooled around with it for a bit, but each time I tried to apply a setting it appeared to flatline the entire scene so nothing was audible. There are a couple of Autotalent (the program I downloaded) tutorials on Youtube, but nothing with the settings I had… so I abandoned that option for now.

Remix #2 (Audio): Son, How’s Your Day? (One-Man Play/Scene)

This is more like a scene than a play. It’s from one of my favorite films, The Breakfast Club, when Bender presents his version of Brian’s supposedly ideal home life.

Here’s my remix:

And here’s the original scene, the best version I could find: