Key Art Development!

     Hello readers! As I continue to work on finalizing my script in the background, I've been trying to touch on some other areas of my project that I haven't started work on yet. The distinct lack of key art that I have so far has been an issue on the forefront of my mind, not only because it is an integral requirement for the success of this project, but also because of how far out of my skill set making key art would be. 

    As I've recounted many times over, I'm not really a "visual" guy. I'd much rather plan things out or write long descriptive passages than I would sketch a drawing, or take a picture of something I want to recreate. So for a long time I dreaded having to make a visual piece to represent the entire film at a glance, since I was clearly way out of my league here, and I didn't even know where to begin!

    Luckily, inspiration strikes from strange places. As I scrolled my YouTube recommended feed, a music remix video for a videogame I enjoy showed up, and feeling bored, I decided to give it a listen. Now while the music itself is probably just a personal interest of mine with no relevance to this project, the background of some of the visuals caught my eye. The broken, glitchy aesthetic seemed to click in my mind, and I decided to use this visual aesthetic to inspire my own key art. So now I had a direction to guide myself with!

However, I still had one massive, glaring issue. I have absolutely zero artistic talent...

    Luckily, I have many friends much more skilled in this field than I am, so I decided to hit their line for advice. My buddy Wade (whose blog you can find here,) is literally certified in programs like Photoshop, and I generally revere him for his artistic vision, so naturally I'd come to him first. To my surprise, he brushed this off as a "pretty easy thing", and offered to do a video call with him to show me how to use Photoshop and achieve the vision I wanted.

    Under his guidance, we were able to create the perfect (or as close as it can be to perfect) key art for my film. Watching him fiddle and work with Photoshop's nigh-infinite tools piqued my interest, so I recorded the process for later study, since I think it'd be a neat skill to pick up. Finally, after about an hour of back-and-forth deliberation we rested on the perfect key art! Thanks Wade (yet again...)!!!

I could've stopped for the day there, but after being inspired by Wade's crash course in Photoshop, I decided to give it a go myself!

    Now obviously, as a literal minute-one beginner, my attempt at mimicking the key art's style by myself was not as polished as the one we made with Wade's help. However, this didn't discourage me, and after another hour of relearning Photoshop on my own and referring to the recordings of the process from before, I finally got something done!

I figured I wanted a profile picture for my social media account because using the main key art as a PFP would be near illegible with how small the text would be, on top of all the extra effects overlaid onto it. So I went with designing a little dead face emoticon (which was Wade's suggestion for the main key art from a while ago), and then mimicking all of the Photoshopping I recalled from the first Photoshop session. For my first time working Photoshop by myself, I'd say it didn't come out half bad!

Finally, I could give my brand social media account some, well, branding. Now that I've overhauled the look of the social media page, maybe it's time to start working on regular promotion posts...

See you next blog post! Hope you like the key art!! (because it's not going anywhere...)