Apocalyptic thriller
The film Children of Men presented a future that was bleak, anarchic and violent. In this it was strikingly similar to all the other movies set in a post-apocalyptic world, which are also for the most part bleak, anarchic and violent: Mad Max, Waterworld, and many more. The film has a strong visual style that’s carried through into the publicity material. Clive Owen gazes at us ruggedly though a broken window: you can tell he’s rugged because he hasn’t shaved for a few days. Unusually, I’m going to use this tutorial not to typify a genre, but to reproduce a single example of a film poster. That’s because this poster presents several distinct points of interest – the stark photographic treatment, the broken glass, the fuzzy stencil lettering – that I think are of enough interest for us to want to see how they’re assembled.
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This photograph, from the Photos.com collection, has the right kind of anti-establishment rebellion to it, and will make a good subject for the poster. But it’s too warm, having been photographed under perfect studio lighting: we need to make it more gritty.
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If we want this to look like real glass, we need to be able to see through it. Lower the opacity of the layer to around 70%, and use the Dodge and Burn tools to add some highlights to it, to break up the uniformity of the surface.
Begin by duplicating the layer. Desaturate the duplicated version using *1R !1R, to produce a grayscale copy (left); then set the mode of this copy to Hard Light, which produces a stark photographic effect (right).
Thc edge of the glass has to be given some thickness. This is created by nudging the shape of the hole and intersecting it with the original glass – see More Info for details. The cracks are drawn with the Lasso tool, and filled with white on the same layer.