Annie Get Your Poster
By David Artiss, member of BMTG since 2001
With the Spring Concerts of 2007 looming, I knew a poster for Annie Get Your Gun, our next show, would be needed for the programme. A poster had been previously designed but it lacked, well, oomph. Catherine Furber, our new Publicity Officer, suggested we maybe think of putting someone on the poster - always a problem when no one has been cast. Never the less, Promotions Officer Kristen Hager volunteered and came along to Round Hill School, gun and hat in hand.
Taking those photos and adding them to the poster is what I document here in a number of phases. Pictures of each can be found below.
Phase 1
The original photo. A number were taken, forward and backward facing, but this was the one chosen. It was taken against a projector screen to create a consistent background.
Phase 2
I imported the picture into Picasa, a very handy free photo organiser. From here I made various changes to colour, contrast, shadows, etc, to create a "warmer" picture that is more in keeping with the location on the poster.
Phase 3
Here I highlighted chunks of the background in Paint Shop Pro and removed them. As you can see some "noise" remains, where there were shadows and slight colour variations in the background.
Phase 4
This was the hard work. First of all I had to remove all the background noise, and then I added my own background colour (which would look natural against the rest of the poster). Finally, I went around the entire edge of Kristen (!) removing any inconsistent edges and anti-aliasing them against the new background image. I also lengthened the gun barrel, removed the cheap plastic studs from the gun (as well as removing some pieces of black plastic from it) and the orange plastic end. I also removed Kristen's rings from the picture. Lastly, after making a joke about the size of her "ass" I also slimmed this down as well.
Phase 5
The picture is made transparent and overlaid onto the poster and a shadow is added, so it looks like Kristen is really there. Voila.
