ILLU Project 2: 3D Poster

For this project, we were each assigned a film to watch and create a 3D poster for. My given film was 'Slashed Dreams', as linked to below:

'Slashed Dreams', also known as 'Sunburst', is a 1975 American thriller produced and directed by James Polakot. The plot follows a young couple, Jenny and Robert, whose love blooms on a camping trip over Silver Pond. The wilderness seems idyllic at first - hiking through the woods, swimming in a crystal lake, bedding down in an old log cabin - until they are warned of a mysterious danger lurking in the forest. Choosing to ignore the advice, Jenny and Robert venture further only to find themselves stalked and attacked by murderous rapists.

​"The young lovers frolic naked in the sparkling pond, while foul sweat rolls down the face of the forest freak... he's watching."
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In all honesty, even just from reading the synopsis, I could tell this was not going to be my cup of tea. Watching the actual film only proved me right - somebody had commented, I quote, "waste of 78 minutes". But, however bad, the film offered plenty of inspiration for poster ideas.

the official poster art and screenshots from 'Slashed Dreams'

​I drew particular influence from the existing poster art for the film; I liked the idea of incorporating trees into my own poster, perhaps by layering card or playing with shadows. The forest freak's knife also seemed worth including for both symbolic purpose and ease of representation in 3D. Figures would be more difficult if I wanted to include those; card silhouetting or clay seemed like the best choices for that approach. With these thoughts in mind, I moved on to create some 2D thumbnails. 

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2D Development

A few poster concepts I came up included the cabin, the skinny-dipping couple in the lake, trees and the knife-wielding figure. I knew I definitely wanted to use silhouettes for a sense of suspense and danger, which would work well with photographic techniques laying with focus and lighting.

When deciding on mediums to use, I sketched a few different ideas like that on the left at first. After a few pretty awful attempts at card layering, I thought of something I felt would work much better.

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3D Development and Process

I have a lot of pets, a lot of houseplants, I enjoy collecting little bits and pieces from mother nature and I love crafting miniature landscapes and scenes. What does all this have in common? It means I have a seemingly infinite supply of natural materials! With so much of this at hand, and a forest scene to construct for the poster, I got quite excited about recreating the scene in miniature. Some materials I started off with included:

• riverstones, aquarium gravel and top dressing
• aquatic bio-soil (my shrimp tank uses this to feed its plants)
• miniature bogwood
• reindeer moss
• landscaping turf and sand
• an exo-terra feeding dish (borrowed from my leaf insects)

I did consider incorporating my army of succulents, especially the sedums and rattails that better resembled foliage, but decided against it due to their fragility.

I ran with the idea of recreating the lake scene - where Robert and Jenny go skinny-dipping in Silver Pond. This seemed like a pivotal moment in the movie, and is also where we first meet the attackers - for dramatic effect, I wanted to include one of them watching the couple from the shadows, waiting with his knife. First of all, however, I had to build the miniature landscape. Enclosed in an upturned box frame, I laid a base layer of sand and placed the "lake" (the feeding dish), adding the bogwood and turf as background foliage. Having decided the sand was too pale in the eye of the camera, I layered the bio-soil over it to darken the scene.

Silver Pond was not only the lake in the film, but the name of the hiking area the couple were backpacking in. It was mountainous and hilly, so I dug out the foam backing of my exo-terra to use as a backdrop. The grey-brown tones of the foam helped a lot to steady the colour balance during photos. I surrounded the feeding dish entirely with moss and turf to give the scene more depth, and provide a foreground of "bushes" for the attacker's silhouette to hide behind later.

Speaking of foreground, I felt the scene was still missing something. Eventually my idiot brain figured out what my forest scene was missing; the bloody trees. We happen to have an old and dying hedge in the back garden which is coming down after nesting season anyway, so I borrowed some of its arms and fingers to make trees with. I separated them into different sizes for different depths of the scene to keep a believable perspective; with a little moss "foliage", they were good to go.

With the landscape complete, I had a small photoshoot before constructing the figures just to experiment with perspective, focus and lighting. I tried different light sources, including daylight and both warm and white LEDs, and swapped lenses and distances until I felt I had the right shot. One I had that, it was time to make the tiniest card silhouettes I've ever made. They were a bit rough around the edges, but I didn't stress too much since the desired atmosphere needed a semi-blurred photograph anyway.

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​The Finished Poster

It took quite a while, a second pair of hands, two lamps and a ridiculous half-crouch position to get the right shot; from just behind the attacker, peering over the foreground bushes at the focused midground where the couple bathe. I was fairly happy with how it turned out, and I enjoyed the hands-on crafting element of this project.

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​project notes