In this assignment we were given was the task of creating 4 or 5 final pictures that we would then turn into a game cover/DVD case, poster or both if you wanted to aim for higher grades. The assignment was called "Film Noir" and this was set in around the 1945s-1955s. The type of clothing that was used around these times were suits and ties, fedora/top hats, long trench coats and guns, cigarettes and alcohol. This time period was notorious for guns, drugs, bootlegging (which was when drinking was banned so people would go to underground pubs to drink), murders and just overall violence, this made this assignment quite exciting. We had to take all of this into account while creating our pictures and game/DVD covers or posters.
The images that inspired me were all film noir and most of them were black and white as film noir was all in black and white, my DVD cover was a sin city inspired one and others were posters and google images. They inspired me because they weren't easy to create and i knew they'd give me a good challenge which is what i wanted. I didn't just want to take a picture of a gun, make it black and white and add text. They were also all quite cool looking and met qualifications for a film noir DVD cover/poster.
There are three lighting techniques used in film noir and these three that are used are:
- Natural light (the sun coming through a window and hitting a mans face for example).
- Flash light or red heads.
- Soft light.
My 4 ideas for my shots were to have my friend posing with a gun for the first one and to then take a picture of a street and combine them together while adding other effects to it and this would be my front cover while my back cover plan was to take a picture of some alcohol, cigarettes and other props so what i did was, my girlfriend let me borrow her camera so i could go round to my nans because she has a whole sack of cigarette buds, take my Jack Daniels with me and then take a picture of the cigarettes and Jack Daniels with some matches, my wallet and pack of cigarettes near the whiskey glass. There was also another picture that was put at the back of the DVD cover and that was my old next door neighbour called Chris, he had an old leather jacket and a fedora hat so i asked him to pose for picture with a cigarette in his mouth/hand and he invited me round. For my poster i hired out a studio and shot a picture of my friend posing in a certain way and as for the final picture i had to wait till it got a bit dark so i could take a picture of a windowsill and i also turned my light off and put the flash on rather the light in the room so it would be more of a direct light shot at the windowsill from my camera rather than a light above.
The sort of things i had to take into account while doing this task was the location in which i was going to take pictures, two of them were done in college though so that wasn't really an issue as i just had to hire out the studio for that, i didn't have to think about the weather and who's about or if its private/public property etc. However for the background of the sin city front cover i had to go out and take a picture of a creepy street at night and i was hoping it would get foggy and it actually went really foggy one week for about 3 or 4 days so i went out one night with a camera and took the picture around the corner from my house. I had to make sure the weather was okay which i did and the time was around 22:00 because i wanted to make sure it was really dark, as i set my ISO to the highest reading and checked if he location was okay to use i took my pictures and they ended up coming out fine, For the background pictures it was a bunch of cigarettes, alcohol and a few other things. I had to make sure that the time was right, taking into account the time and place, the position of the sun which would be casting the shadow onto the table i was going to shoot and also getting props was a difficult thing to do but i just asked people if i could borrow them for an hour or so and it was fine. Models weren't as hard to find as i thought as i found that most people love the idea of someone with a fancy camera taking photos of them for their work and lastly equipment was easy to acquire, for red heads i just asked the technician and for a camera i asked my girlfriend.
I used various skills while editing. I used the levels and curves tool and these 2 tools (depending on what you want from your image) affect both the luminosity and colour saturation of your image and exposure which controls the brightness also and how much your picture is "exposed", saturation is how bright you want your colours to be, not necessarily the brightness but how much you want the colours to really stand out in your picture and that's similar to my next tool that i used which was called colour balance, although you can change your pictures colours this is more to do with changing the colours to how YOU want them changed, so lets say for example i too a picture of a field with flowers in it but i only wanted the roses to show up, I would simple de-saturate all the other colours individually and saturate the red colour bar, crop is also good for if you want to simple cut ends of you'd image out and the magic wand tool is also very useful if you'd like to get rid of a whole certain colour like if i had an image on a zebra but wanted to make all the white parts of the zebra transparent i would simply use the magic wand and click and delete what i wanted, however if you'd like to be a little bit more precise with your image you can use the pen tool to draw around the object you want to keep or delete and then delete or keep that object. The transform tool is also useful for selecting and re-sizing images. On my Sin City remake i had to create my own rain filter so what i did was i googled how to create a rain filter and this message appeared at the top of google so i followed the instructions and if you look closely on the image you can see the rain on the image, it wasn't just a simple 3 step thing to do and boom you've got rain it was quite complicated and i was there for a while doing it but seeing how it looks now was worth it I've uploaded some images of the editing here for you to see:
And here are my final posters and my DVD artwork:
If i had to do this again i would probably take more time on the last poster you see above as i don't think it looks as good as the others. I have learnt how to edit a lot better as it comes with practice anyway and I've also learnt how to take better pictures by learning about the ISO and depth of field etc. I think that i can take better pictures now also because i know how to composition the camera a lot better.
My final images, poster and DVD cover meets the assignment brief as its Film Noir looking (has the correct props like guns, cigarettes and alcohol etc and is also in black and white.) and follows the guidelines.
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