Creating a Background

After creating most of the spread I noticed it seemed quite bland, or just not very 'Back to the Future'-esque. I think this is because of the amount of white space in the background. The characters are posing but don't look like they're in any sort of situation.

Like the previous articles I'd looked at I wanted to immerse the article in the style and themes of the film, so I had an idea to create a background for the spread that would add a clearly defined Back to the Future feel to the spread.

 

On the official website I noticed the game designers have created a poster for the game that is a throwback to the original theatrical posters for the film. This gave me a good idea for a background. I decided to recreate the background featured in these posters for my spread. Not only is it visually iconic to fans of the series but it's vibrant and not too busy because of the way it's quite stylized. Thus it would probably work well as a background for the article as text should be legible.

 

I started off with a stock image of a cloudy night sky. I chose one I thought had a similar look to the one in the poster. I put this into Photoshop. 

I made the blue of the sky more vibrant like the poster using the brightness, hue and contrast tools.

 Then I darkened the top of the image to make it look like it was fading darkness. This was done using a layer ontop that was all black and then faded out using a layer mask.

 The sunset effect was created using the gradient tool and another layer mask ontop of that to recreate the orange fading into the blue. Lots of movies use the mixture of blue and orange in their posters as they compliment each other and suggest action danger and suspence. They also suggest the clashing of two worlds or ideals when placed directly next to each other.

 The shining light from the car was created by drawing triangles emanating from the corner of the frame. Then a slight blur and lighting effects were added to enhance the shining appearance. I chose to keep this confined to the corner and without the car because I feel this would make the background too busy to lay type over. The rest of the background is dark and so a large white area would heavily contrast and mean the text would have to be different colours to be legible.

Finally the road and horizon were created using a shape tool and noticable film grain was added over the whole image (as is the style of the posters). I chose to set the road and mountains lower down than the posters actually depict them as I didn't want them to cut through the article half way down the page. The article should fit nicely in the area where the sky is.