The time is finally here! For anyone who has been following me on Social Media the last few weeks you have probably heard me teasing these series of images. For you and those who may not have known alike you are all in for a treat.
I was contacted by my friends over at The Fandom Nerdlesque (who if you don’t know are an Atlanta based collective of nerd-themed burlesque performers from all across the country) asking if I wanted to be a part of the marketing push for their upcoming Marvel Themed Show (being performed at the time of this blog post on Friday and Saturday THIS WEEK..HINT HINT…TICKET LINK AT THE END OF THE POST…HINT HINT).
After some very brief talk of concept, we decided that the end goal was to emulate the famous Marvel MCU posters that have been coming out regularly. It wasn’t until we were on set going through photos that I thought about using some various forms of compositing to create artificial backdrops for each character.
Jet Spiegl - Matt “Daredevil” Murdock
Final poster design by Evin from Apologue Media. He did a FANTASTIC job of throwing everything together into an amazing final product. Be sure to throw him some love as well!
Additional poster design by Kali Fornication (You can see her link above under her Thanos photo).
Get your tickets here!
For a peek behind the curtain as to how the sausage was actually made, keep reading below.
I’ve done some experimenting with various forms of compositing over the last few years. For more of an expert’s view I would make sure to check out the work of Renee Robyn or Clinton Lofthouse. Anything I have learned was very much learned by watching both of these amazing artists at work.
The first part of the recipe was making sure that the subject of the photo was lit properly. In the case of these Marvel photos I needed 4 lights. A Key in a 3’ Octabox, a fill in the form of a 12” beauty dish, and two 3x5 softboxes as rear kickers.
That setup lent itself to a photo like the below.
by using content aware fill you get one of the following photos below.
One worked better than another:
Spoiler alert, it was this one that worked much better.
Afterwards I roughly followed this tutorial from DIY Photography to mask the image
Click the photo above to read an in depth article that I assure you is WAY less scary that it looks.
After masking its then just a matter of sourcing an appropriate background, and then adding any needed tweaks to it to fit the image at hand, and then several hours of refinements…the process of which I don’t have photos of because I didn’t think to take them.
If you would like to see a more in-depth step by step, let me know. I’d be happy to work something together!