Finished Ad

Original Photo

There are times when I am asked to do quite a bit of difficult design work, and this was no exception. Design a Print ad for a Film and animation VFX company, Photon VFX. Briefed with a rough mock up sketch, I decided the only way to really present what the client was after was to tackle it from scratch. To start with I had to capture the background plate. (seen above) Nice and simple, 2 wine bottles and a glass, plate, cutlery and napkin. I used what I could get my hands on within budget. This was set up on a large table with only one 800watt redhead key light directed at the ceiling, to give a nice overall soft light from above. Then filled in the high lights and shadows with 4 or 5 halogen desk lamps. There was a fair bit of playing around to get it how I had imagined, using cardboard cutters and such.

I was also given a digital SLR EOS300D to use as apposed to my film EOS300. Having a Digital camera for such shots is a god send as I ran around 100 test shots until I was happy. yes yes.. I Know Im way behind the times talking about how cool digital is.
Now once I had all the images on the system, I chose 10, and then narrowed it down to one that the client agreed on. The rest is photoshop. DAYS.. of photoshop!
Firstly, I masked off the entire background red, and hand painted over it all with the aging tool to smooth out the wrinkles and give it a nice textured look. I also used the mask down the track to desaturate the red so it didnt distract from the 2 red bottles.The cutlery had to be gold and due to the lack of funding for gold cutlery, (what? you mean you dont just have Gold Cutlery ?) I had to mask out and tint.
Now you’ll notice the cork is missing from the original image. Due to so many variations of the shots, there were some without the cork. So I simply cut one out, including the reflections and shadows from one of the other images and blended it in by hand.
I added the Photon Logo on and pallette colours on the plate using the flat 2D elements I created previously, bending and stretching using the perspective nodes on the bounding boxes. and adjusting the transparency to blend.

The most difficult and time consuming part of the entire project, was the labels. If i had to do it again, I would have at least made 2 red labels and stuck them on the bottles, with or without the text. It would have made life SO much simpler. The labels you see in the image were 100% hand painted. Thats Right, a whole 10 hours of hand painting. Thank god for Wacom Intuos Tablets.
The Client wanted an electric spark between the bottles and after the full day of hand painting labels I decided to grab some stock images and blend it in until approved.
After everything was approved and the client was happy, I then set about adding all the reflections of the digital elements in the bottles, glass and plate.
Finally, the text was inserted and upon Final approval, I added the 3mm Bleed edge and checked all the CMYK colour values to to make sure the printer printed correctly, then Uploaded the final file at 300dpi to the Magazines server.
And there you have it. The Ad can be seen on the inside back cover of the Latest September Issue of the Visual Effects magazine Smoke & Mirrors (SM) The one with the Mummy 3 on the cover.
The Photon VFX logo is Copyright Photon VFX PTY LTD.

UPDATE 10-09-08
I also created another version of this ad which included the addition of 2 3D animated characters, which is now available in the latest Australian film industry magazine Encore. The ad is full page within the Animation special section. I am unable to present that image here as it contains unauthorised copyright material. If i can get clearance Ill add it at a later date.