Narnia Movie poster

[bfowler]

http://www.movieposter.com/poster/MPW-14671/Chronicles_Of_Narnia_The_Lion_The_Witch_And_The_Wa rdrobe.html
I really love this poster and I'm pretty sure it's digital although it reminds me a great deal of Drew Struzan's work. I was hoping some of the great talent here could shed some light on how something this tight is done.

It is photographs that have been worked over with filters and computer effects? Maybe heavy refrenced and painted over digitally or is the digital painter just freakin awsome? It's just got that cool illustrated look without being just a photograph.

If anyone knows how to post the image in the thread that would be great but I'm not even sure if that's allowed.

[waronmars]

that link don't work

[Elwell]

I really love this poster and I'm pretty sure it's digital although it reminds me a great deal of Drew Struzan's work. I was hoping some of the great talent here could shed some light on how something this tight is done.

It is photographs that have been worked over with filters and computer effects? Maybe heavy refrenced and painted over digitally or is the digital painter just freakin awsome? It's just got that cool illustrated look without being just a photograph.

I'm sorry, but outside of being composed (and composited) better than most, it's the same old photoshop cut and paste job that's dominated movie posters for the past ten years.

[bfowler]

So I guess it is just photographs and photoshop tricks. What about the collars around the polar bears necks? And what do you mean when you say composited?

[CreationEdge]

Composited, as in basically just a bunch of separate elements from the movie put into one poster. You have Aslan, the witch, the kids.

As for everything else, I have no idea how they do it. Could be a doctored image, which is very likely. I don't know if they take stills from the movie and then repaint them or anything. Wouldn't surprise me either.

[Elwell]

So I guess it is just photographs and photoshop tricks.
Exactly. This is what you get when people who know what they're doing do what every moron with a copy of Photoshop thinks they can do.
What about the collars around the polar bears necks?
Taken from an FX shot, I assume.
And what do you mean when you say composited?
It's a composite image, made up from numerous other ones, and not just in the obvious places.

[grimrichard]

...reminds me an awful lot of a similar Frazetta painting that used a sled pulled by polar bears.

[Pixel8]

Yes, this is some basic Photoshop work. What they've likely done is to work up from a black background, built to the size they wanted. The most critical technique to this is to put a layer mask on each object. When they paint the color black on the mask, it causes that part of the image to become transparent. The closer to complete black they paint, the more transparent the image becomes.

You will note the empty space in the upper right, just in front of the witch'es nose? It goes to complete black against the shadow cast along the right side of the lion image. The lion is also very dark. Other places where there is no image are black. That's why I said they built upon a black background.

When it comes to the lighter upper-right areas, they just faded out (using a mask) along the lion's mane, and then faded in (using a mask) from the images there. The birds are using the exact same technique to fade into the lion, and into the image above them. The difference here, is that the designer was careful to paint fully white on the birds themselves on the layer mask. Painting completely white on the birds' mask caused them to become fully opaque and visible.

There is a good sense of form on the left side of the image, as the lighter elements blend in an L shape from the top to the bottom of the image, playing against the light side of the lion. They also work because they use the same color palette of reds and yellows.

As the images get into the darker, right side, we see the darker characters, but the image becomes weak. Note again the witch in the upper-right. She is on a light background, but is forced to fit in to a dark part of the picture. That's why her background quickly vanishes to the empty blackness between her and the lion.

Mostly just a lot of careful masking to fit a bunch of separate images together. That's called compositing.

- Pixel8 -