DVD Cover

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DVD Cover Remake

Advanced Electronic Imaging

We explored Hollywood in a way for this project by recreating a convincing DVD cover of a movie that we were able to choose, as well as the design on the disk inside the case, I decided to recreate the cover for the movie Avatar as I thought it would offer some challenging elements. I also liked the idea of turning myself in an Avatar since I am not that comfortable in front of the camera. I had a fellow student take the base image in our studio on campus. It is shown here along with the cover I referenced.

This project ended up consisting of two primary stages. The first of these was to morph my self portrait into the avatar which would be the front cover.

This is a timeline of the first steps I took along the way. I cleaned up the image in Photoshop by smoothing out lines and skin imperfections mainly with content aware, clone, and healing brush. Then I used the transform functions and the liquify tool/bloat to begin redirecting and reshaping the eye area.

Once I had most of the major alterations completed, I moved the image into the provided template to finish it there.

From this point I began experimenting with different ways to create the blue shade on the skin, and also focused on the single eye. I used various brushes in photoshop for some elements including the eyelashes, iris, and (a bit later) a flare brush. Although I moved on past these steps I went went back several times to adjust details that I noticed.

For the next larger stage of the project I began adding the numerous elements normally found on DVD covers. This process included images from the actual movie, as well as the smaller stamps and labels. In order to place these smaller pieces into the project without distortion, I used the image trace function in Adobe Illustrator to make them into vector files.

I continued to make changes in layout and adjustments to the front cover as I worked through adding all of the elements. The first actual text that went into the design was on the back cover. I found the font “SF Movie Poster” online which is similar to the font used on typical movie advertisements, and mimicked the typographic layout as similarly as possible. The vector elements were on a transparent background and I used the blending modes on the Avatar text title images.