I love Photoshop and have used it for many years to edit photos or make images for the internet. So when we had to make a story board poster for our capstone I took that opportunity to have fun with it.
Since Read ‘Em & Reap is primarily a comedy I figured what would be the best way to portray that in our story poster than make it a small cartoon like comic strip.
The idea that I started with was a take on “Are You My Mother?” but replacing that with “Have you seen my Scythe?”. So Death goes to various part of the game asking people if they’d seen his scythe and getting various humorous responses.
The size of the poster had to be 300 DPI maximum height or width to be 42 inches. JPG/TIFF. I started with the width or 42 inches and 300 DPI making the height 12 inches. The background I wanted to be plain as I figured most attention would be paid to the comic itself then I set up five rows of two columns of images each 3 inch by 4 inch in size.
Next was primarily the easy part. I found the scenes I needed in the game, did a print screen, and pasted that information into photoshop. From there it was an easy clip out what I needed, increase the DPI to 100, set the Marquee Tool to the Fixed Size of 1800px to 1200px (or 3in to 4in) to get the all the information I needed.
I finished up a rough draft and showed it to the group and asked if I was on the right track and they loved it.
The next step was changing the conversation bubbles. Since they were all the same size I copied one with the Marquee Oval Tool and pasted it over Death’s words so I could replace them with something more in line with the comic.
This lead to a second draft and still more changes. Since this was a comic we figured maybe make it like an old cartoon intro with the starburst, movie wrap around, and picture of the main character. So I used the two primary colors in the day and night backgrounds for the game for the starburst. Using this tutorial I came up with the effect I wanted.
Doing a quick search on google I found a movie title background from a free resource so I took that and changed it into the green color which matched the starburst.
The last thing was the background needed something more as it seemed too plain with all the color and action so I used an asset I made for the game of a spinning vortex (similar to this). I changed the opacity to 37% to give it a faded look to it and the I was done.
Here’s the finished product:
