14 year-old in Toronto.
Hobbyist graphic designer.
Overall mildly funny guy
Case Study: Black Swan Poster
Constantly do I feel obliged to share what few secrets in the field of graphic design I hold, as the community has thought me so much for so little. But, much like a magician, an artist tends to keep his secrets to himself; therefore, allowing the numerous streaks of interpretations people may have on their work to flourish. “How is it not a pipe [Magritte]? Sculptures or paintings [Buonarroti]? What the fuck was in that briefcase? [Tarantino?!”. But I, like many others, should never dare compare our works with the prowess of the names given. I’m pretty torn up about where I stand on the ‘art’ spectrum, or if I’m there at all.
I really don’t know why I said all that, or why I’m doing this, but I thought I’d dissect my poster for Black Swan.
This was inspired by the album cover of James Blake’s latest self-entitled album. What particularly drew me to it was the use of double exposure; atmospheric, conflicted and mysterious, much like the line of character development Nina (Natalie Portman) goes through in the film.
Bought Black Swan in Blu-ray.
Fired up avidemux2 and saved frame after frame for good double exposure.
After making pairs of frames, I began testing
Background setup.
Took various frames, motion blurred and coloured them.
Double exposure:
The eyes became completely black after doing so - took stock photo of a white swan, resized, wrapped and placed them into the pupil to make it look proper.
Add a vector mask+type:
There we have it - a 7 hour posted condensed.
- Note the missing highlight on Natalie’s left cheek: it’s a white dress in motion (her actual dress in the promotional posters) clipped out of the darker regions.
- Sides of the head were clipped out with the general shape of a swan feather
- Note the repetition of clippings under her lips, and on the bottom feather
- Stains inside the title
- White swans were used for her pupils
- The motion blur background and feathers were coloured frames from the film, blurred
- There are 4 hidden swan clippings in the poster
