This is how the background sound effects sound so far. I’ve combined 5 different clips of bug sounds and added effects in Garageband to add to the distortion.
Here’s a image comprised of a repeated font in different colours, giving a screenprint effect. I really think the repeated text works well by itself; I intend to scan in an envelope and experiment with adjustments to get a subtle texture I can use for a background. This will bring more to the image, as a block colour as a background is too flat.
This is the result of some experimentation and my curiosity surrounding how the image would look with a lot more contrast. I wanted to see how far I could take this one image before moving on to another. I placed an ‘Invert’ layer above all the other layers, thus inverting everything and allowing me to alter the brightness/contrast/levels in accordance to the image’s new high contrast, dark look. I altered the hue & saturation for an overall plum red colour; I’m not sure I like this now, as there isn’t enough balance of colour. It just looks as though there’s a red film over the top of the image. I’ll try changing the colour of the bug face - a light blue might look effective and bring more balance & contrast.
The eyes on this image are hand drawn to bring more natural media into the image. They look a lot better than plain vector shapes. I added large pupils and referred to close up macro photos of human eyes to bring human elements to the bug-shaped eyes. The veiny lines make them look strained, referring to Gregor’s entrapment in a foreign body.
Here are the first attempts of figuring out where the title looks best, showing the black vectors. The antennae are not vectors, however, as I don’t currently have Illustrator to create perfectly styled, contoured and the vector lines I created in Photoshop were too thin and generally didn’t fit. Instead, I drew them with my tablet using a hard round brush with pressure sensitivity enabled.
Now that I look at these again, it makes me wonder if these could be used as promotional images too, or instead of the textured image; they’re a lot more bold and clinical, which matches our desired theme/look.
Here’s my first attempt at a poster. I took a minimal approach, using vector shapes to convey the recognisable parts of a beetle/bug’s face. The vectors by themselves stood out too much against the background, so I changed the layer styles to ‘Overlay’ and ‘Soft Light’, depending on how light or dark certain areas of the background are.
The background is made up of two layers, both paper textures I created with a few Photoshop brushes. A second layer was necessary to fill in gappy areas in the first. When I was done with these two layers, the image seemed a little too bland, so I brought in an ink splash I scanned in and set the layer style to ‘Hard Light’, opacity 46% and fill 11%. These settings were necessary so as not to have it contrast too much against the image’s cold, faint atmosphere.
The font used is ‘Helvetica’. ’Metamorphosis’ is 64pt, vertically scaled to 112% and horizontally scaled to 80%. ‘The’ is 26pt and horizontally scaled to 110%. I made ‘The’ a lot smaller than ‘Metamorphosis’ to bring out the latter and make it jump out from the page. I posted this to our group’s Facebook page and Tom said he’d like to see it without ‘The’, so I’ll remove it to see how it looks. I’m going to try some different fonts and find one that makes ‘Metamorphosis’ look more effective by itself; Helvetica doesn’t really do it any justice.
To create these fonts, I painted with water and dropped and flicked ink into each letter. I used the same style with each font more or less, stretching or compressing some of them but following a square look. The bottom and second from the top fonts have a more organic look to them. With the bottom one, I dropped ink twice into each letter and left it to flow and bleed into the paper in its own natural way. With the other, I took more control over the process, dropping ink at 2 or 3 points and moving the paper, sometimes adding more water to encourage the ink to flow around more.
The top one was supposed to display emphasis on the word ‘morph’ within ‘metamorphosis’, but didn’t quite work out. I didn’t want the whole word to suddenly change in font size, but gradually bulge out. Instead, ‘O’ and ‘R’ are bulging out by themselves. The end of the word, ‘osis’, is much darker than the rest of the word; this refers to the degradation, deterioration and ultimate death of Gregor. However, I don’t intend on using this font or idea in a final image or poster, so I won’t work on it any more.
To create the font third from the bottom, I painted the letters with water then flicked/sprayed ink at them by holding back the bristles of my brush then releasing them. I love how it’s captured the energy of the ink being sprayed, and the slight marble look that has resulted from the ink blobs being distorted by the water. The letters become faded towards the end, referring to Gregor’s fading identity and recognition as a family member/person.
I’m not sure any of these will work well in posters, as my imagery is going to be made up of vectors - there might be too much contrast between natural and digital media. Maybe these could work as an image by themselves? If I clean them up and maybe separate them, I’d imagine an eye-catching image could be made. One could be superimposed over another; a font could be repeated and tiled, or repeat from top to bottom with a slight overlap.
This book cover combines digital and hand drawn typography, which I might do also. The digital type is bold and powerful, large and denotes his iconic status. The handwritten type seems to convey the stages Gregor goes through: bold letters that become more unstable and chaotic, then thin out.
The beetle is part mechanical, part silhouette. There are absolutely no human characteristics to it, other than the fact that the object is man-made. This relates to our thoughts on having a steampunk look somehow.
I’ve been focusing on typography recently, experimenting with painting with water and dropping ink into it. Here’s a typography pamphlet created by Klaas van Kreis, about a quote from Metamorphosis. The letters combine organic and geometric elements to create a fluid look that, from afar, looks quite hand drawn. Other letters are very strong and obviously digital.
(Click the image)
Posters for the 2009 movie District 9 are very minimalist, using vector shapes to convey silhouettes of alien creatures.
