i spent some time tonight working on a poster for the school’s production of fame. the inspiration for the poster is the one on the cct website, although admittedly this looks nothing like that. i think i need to find a different picture of the kids. in the real fame poster, the actors have this “pop” that i don’t think is in the picture i’m using. there are also a lot less people in that poster. but i wanted to go through the exercise of working with the picture, photoshoping out the background, and generally going through the basics steps of recreating the whole thing.

in the picture itself, a few things are noticably problematic. one, because we tried to get all of the kids in there (19, i think), we had to do a different angle and got the bowling pin-like formation. the particular picture i grabbed also has teh girl in front looking in a different direction than everyone else. also problematic, and looking through the other shots, by the time we did the full body group shot, the kids were tired and stopped looking at anything in particular. something to remember for next time. the other problem was the background. i had a few strobes, and the place we took the picture was the stage in front of a wall that made it difficult to crop out. it proved impossible to throw enough light on the group without some of that light falling on the background, given their relatively short distance from the background, so i had to spend more time in photoshop than i would have liked.

for this draft, i also left the background black instead of blue. i can probably tint it using photoshop, but i’m afraid of some of the artifacts that show up when i do that from having to hide the background.

still, i think it has some promise. of course, we’ll have to wait for the wife to get home to be the final judge.