Mahdi Chowdhury

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I think this obsession is reaching its prime…

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

LittleWhiteLies Magazine has been blurring and smudging the lines between design, art and genuine film geekery

This is what I want out of life; hire me.

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One of my first attempts at a vector poster similar to the ones done by Gabz. A solid 4-hours, and I think it came out pretty well.

(Source: fuckyeahmovieposters)

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A poster for a short story I wrote.
It’s not the best, but you can read it here.

This is what I’ve been working on. A full vector portrait of Gosling from the film Drive. Why? Because the original poster is too damn ugly for a film this good. It’s full vector on a 27 x 40 canvas (fucking huge). It’s already taken a good 6 hours to vectorize, and so far, it’s been killing my RAM. The things I’d do for a good film…