Thursday night parties at the Arthur Murray studio in Tysons Corner is one of the busiest nights on the dance floor! There are group classes just before the party to give students new figures, or to review old figures before they go on their own to practice. With the really nice weather we have been having, it was nice to get outside for an evening before it gets too cold! The staff put together a nice party for everyone just outside the studio this evening. They put a speaker outside, provided some food and drink, then got everyone to dance as usual.
The area around the studio has been hopping with new activity. Tysons West right across the street, new restaurants opening, and the Metro Silver Line in full testing for next year’s opening, means that there is a lot to do! The dancing created a lot of attention, and some of the people passing by jumped in when invited to dance!
The last Tech Thursday, I posted about the Great Gatsby poster from the 2013 movie. I made myself a project to recreate the poster with our local dance studio since they are planning a party with a Great Gatsby theme this October. To start, I made portraits of all the staff, then made a background in Adobe Illustrator to place them. It was a background that was flipped and repeated so that it would give a consistent look to each of the portraits.
To come up with the dimensions for the backgrounds, I based it on a 20 x 30 image. This is a standard size for printing and framing of photos, and would be large enough to put 7 portraits on at one time. In Adobe Photoshop, you can create guides to help you line up elements in your image. So I started with a 20 x 30 image, then made guides all 14.3% apart from each other. This value comes from dividing 100 by 7, which is 14.28… Rounded to 14.3 would fill up the background close to 100% across – 100.1%, actually. Here are screen shots of how to do this:
New Guide option from the menu in Photoshop CS5
Select ‘View’ > ‘New Guide’ to create a guide on your image. The default units in this box are in inches, so change from in to %, and the guide will be placed 14.3% across the image vertically from the left.
Background Graphic Design
New guide at 14.3% of the background vertically
New guide at 14.3% of the background vertically
From here, I just selected the are to the left of the guide to get the dimensions to bring into Illustrator to create the background. Similarly, I made guides in Illustrator that divided the rectangle into quarters. I created the design in one corner, then flipped and moved the design until it filled up the entire area making the design nicely symmtrical:
I burned some of the smaller lines to make it look like they were continuing on under the larger lines. I also made a dark gradient towards the bottom of the frame to add more dimension to the background. Then I pasted the portraits on top of the background, and added them to the complete poster in my evenly spaced guides. This did take me about a day and a half to complete since I was learning a lot of new techniques in Adobe programs, but I think it came out nicely!
This project came out of an event happening at our dance studio this October. An upcoming theme night in October would be dedicated to the novel and movie, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. With such an over-the-top production as Baz Luhrmann is stylistically known to produce, the poster likewise had to reflect the movie. We looked over all the posters from the recently released movie and found several types for different settings. All the photography was amazing, as well as the graphic design for the setting of the portraits. This particular version I thought would work well:
The poster would have to have 7 portraits of the staff of the dance studio, so this would be perfect. Initially I cut faces out from photos I already have from the dance events, but my limited Photoshop skills did not make it work. So, I asked the studio if I could make 3/4 portraits of the staff to use for the poster. They were all excited about the idea, and we knocked out the shoot in 2 hours!
Afterwards, I thought that maybe I could just swap portraits in for the ones already in the poster. That did not work as it would be too difficult to take out the people underneath cleanly before putting in the new portrait. By now, I realize that I really underestimated what it would take to make this poster happen. So I went back to the original poster, and looked into creating the Great Gatsby poster from scratch.
Poster Design
There are repeating background for each of the portraits, and the text and borders were metallic to resemble gates surrounding a large estate. Illustrator would be used to make the backgrounds designs. I started drawing straight up and down lines and diagonal lines exactly 45 degrees from the original lines. When the space was filled, I copied the design, and flipped it horizonally to make a mirror images on the other half of the drawing to make the top of the image.
I then took these top two mirrored images, copied them together, and flipped it vertically to get the bottom half of the background. It actually turned out well! Here is how one of the portraits turned out. I’ll show you how I finished off the poster in a future post after the portraits and background were completed. From left to right are the starting portrait, the graphics made for the background, and both put together to be put into the poster.
