OUGD503 - Work For Creative Advertising Student - Second Billboard and First Poster

Beth sent me the below photos to work on for the other 3 visuals she needed doing.

   

The immediate problem was the photo she'd taken of the people playing the xbox was that there was no space to put any text because of how the important elements of the photo (the people and the TV) are taking up the entire picture..

Another issue was that the photo from inside the car was taken when the car was parked on a drive, meaning all you could see through the windscreen was  a garage door. I told Beth that I'd be able to replace that in Photoshop to the point where it wouldn't be very noticeable at all, as getting another photo from inside a car would take a while given that we only know a couple amount of people that have cars with them at uni.

Second Billboard

I took the below photo on my phone from outside Beth's house to replace the garage door that was in the windscreen. I took it from such an angle that was very similar to the angle the photo of the car was taken from to make the editing look less noticeable.

After cropping it down to a 2:1 ratio, I altered the brightness on contrast of Beth's photo to match up with mine better, as hers was a bit dark. I then used a layer mask to replace the garage door with my photo, positioning the photo to get a realistic viewpoint.

I then worked on the changes/additions she wanted on the dashboard she wanted. I wasn't overly confident with this because I was quite pessimistic as to how realistic it would look. I started by adding the globe to the dial. This was done using a drop bevel, a drop shadow, and the warp and distort tool. We decided to use a simple vector image of the globe as our starting point rather than a more realistic complicate image, as we thought this would make it clearer what it was.

We used an orange background for the dashboard as that was what the background colour of the dial behind the steering wheel was. For this reason we also used text that was dark grey rather than black. Both the screen and the mileage counter were vector shapes that I'd created and rasterized so I could apple bevels and shadows too to make them look less photoshopped. We used a font called FONT NAME HERE which we found on the internet because of how it was clear but still had a pixelated fell to it because of the corners of the letters.

When I was happy with how they were positioned and looked I merged them together so I could use the burn and dodge tools to alter the lighting so it matched the rest of the image

I found that placing the logo where Beth wanted it meant that it didn't show up very well because of the lack of tonal contrast between black and the dark red jumper, so we decided that if I could change the colour of the jumper to a light blue with it still looking realistic, we'd do that. After a while of messing around, this was the best I could do, and Beth was happy with it.

We then couldn't find another area to put the "...meanwhile the Earth is screaming" text, so we had to put it next to the logo. Because of how well the text worked in the previous billboard we wanted to keep it the same size for continuity. This meant we had to make the logo smaller than it was in the first billboard. Because of this I went back and made the logo in the first billboard smaller so it matched the size of the second one.

First Poster

In Beth's initial drawing there was a vertical banner that said "Killing us slowly". However, she found that it was difficult to get a banner in shot when she went to get the photos. This was a  problem in that there wasn't space for us to Photoshop one in either, we decided that the next best thing to to would be to add in a sign on the shelf with the message instead. Because we were doing this I chose to use the photo with the bottles of coke rather than one with crisps because it'd stand out more against the darker colours of the coke than the lighter colours of the crisps. 

The colours and font are based on the colours and font of the kitchen roll thats in the shopping trolley. We positioned it where we did because of how the arm and the way she's looking lead your eye to it, without it covering up her hand.

I cropped it down to a ratio that was A size paper because that gives it gives it the most potential for other uses because of its standard size. I also used the brightness and contrast sliders to brighten it  up a bit 

We were then struggling to find a place for the rest of the text because of how busy the photo is. Beth suggested adding a gradient behind the text, I tried this using the colour of the supermarket floor to make it look as neutral as possible.

Whilst Beth was happy with this, I wasn't so sure and so later had another go at the text using a bit more "artistic licence" or whatever the design equivalent is.

I've e-mailed these to Beth and will talk to her about it next time I see her in the hope that I can convince her that these are better. I used grey because it was very neutral, and think it looks a lot less juvenile and more professional, making good use of negative space.