When I first saw this assignment I was a little skeptical because…first of all how do I choose just one movie poster out of all the movie posters in the world? If you haven’t picked up on it already I’m a very indecisive person so choosing a movie poster to create in a “silly” fashion was a challenge, BUT I narrowed it down to Men in Black (M.I.B) with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones from 1997.

Using the free photo bank Pixabay I chose some images with transparent backgrounds and arranged onto the movie poster. However, unlike the instructions the assignment which said use Photopea I used a different website which is quite similar, but I know a little more about it seeing as I use in to complete digital colleges/artwork in high school. Pixlr X is another free online photo editing software like Photopea, however it does have a limit of 3 .jpeg documents per day. Despite this I know this program more and was more comfortable doing it on there.

Now time for the big reveal, here’s my silly-fied M.I.B poster:

So let me walk you through my creative process…

After selecting the movie poster I wanted to use, I went to Pixabay to chose images relating to aliens which is where I go the idea to include the flying saucer in the upper lefthand corner and the three alien head silhouettes and ET looking fingers touching the guns. Along with that I included a centipede, because if you’ve ever watched the movie there’s a centipede looking monster/alien living on Earth and they have to find it and dispose of it.

The birthday hats simply add more silliness while the recoloration of the background looked really cool to me so I kept it. For the most part this was a relatively “easy” assignment for me to complete and I had fun doing it.

So to begin, I waited till I got a haircut, because I was not doing this college looking rough. After that I took about 30 pictures of my face with a static background and compiled them into a cohesive piece. I had no idea how to do that but I soon figured it out as I started playing with the layers, setting each one to overlay the others. To be honest with you it looks a bit freaky, but so does the example, so that’s how I know I did something right.

Here it is:

See…it looks creepy, but I still kind of like it. I took the liberty of adding some orange saturation to the image to give it some warmth and added some glitch effect onto the whole thing to make it look like a low quality image from an old camera or video. The eyes, or the black lines that should make up the eyes staring into my soul really add to the creepiness.

Improvements:

After completing both of these assignments I think that a little more hands on instruction/modeling would be required for others to feel completely comfortable in their storytelling skills. It requires practice, intent, and patience. If I’ve learned anything from these projects and making my own art its that practice makes perfect, the more you practice, the more you force yourself to get better, you will start to see the results of your work.

If I had to set a number to the amount of times you should be practicing, I’d say about twice a week. Try every feature you can, make mistakes, make art that you think is horrible because eventually you’ll go back to them in the future and wonder how you made it look so messed up in the first place.

To sum up, practicing a new skill is never easy, and if it is and you’re the chosen one then you’re a lucky case, but for the people like me who struggle and sometimes get frustrated, that’s part of the process unfortunately. You just gotta push through it if you’re serious about getting better in anything, not just digital storytelling.