Title:
The Matrix
The Matrix
Author(s)
Blasko, Kevin
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Abstract
In creating my poster for The Matrix, I employed one of my favorite pieces of software, Adobe Photoshop. I’ve been playing around with Photoshop for the past few years on and off, and its capabilities are truly astounding. Despite my career path in engineering, I’ve always had a bit of skill in the arts, and the opportunity to create a movie poster was highly intriguing. The main source for my poster’s contents was Google image search, whereby I found suitable pictures of Niobe, Morpheus, and the ship of which Morpheus is the captain, the Nebuchadnezzar. I also exhaustively searched the internet to find the perfect font to use for the main title, as well as to find a fitting font for the tagline and actors’ names.
The poster I authored was aimed at emphasizing a select few of the themes I found most appealing in the movie. For one, I chose to include the Nebuchadnezzar in flight being pursued by sentinels in an attempt to stress the science fiction and action themes present in the movie. I created a lightning effect around the ship to show that the ship was in flight and fully powered, and I added closely trailing sentinels to imply an exciting chase sequence. All of the posters I found for the movie were completely devoid of mention of both the film’s antagonists and the flight technology aspects of the film, a theme I found to be one of the most interesting in the film, so I chose to rectify this situation by including those very themes in my own work. In choosing characters to place on my poster, it seemed only obvious to include the two most recognized ship captains in the film series, Morpheus and Niobe. I placed them both at equal distance from the viewer, to imply that they are equally important to the plot of the movie, as well as equally skilled. Many scenes in the Matrix trilogy stress Niobe’s skill in flight, as well as her dominant mental stature. Additionally, the gun in Morpheus’s hand implies that he is more of a to-the-point, brute force character, while Niobe’s downward gaze and relaxed stance paint her as less of an aggressor, just as they are portrayed in the film. For the coloring of my poster, I chose to employ mostly dark tones, with the brightest parts of the poster being the two captains, and the ship. I darkened the rear of the ship in an attempt to further emphasize the ship’s status as quickly fleeing from the oncoming sentinels, and darkened the Matrix code in the center of the poster to draw the viewer’s eyes to the ship. Around the text, I placed a green glow to match the eerie green of the Matrix code, mainly to make the poster more visually appealing. These choices of color act to exhibit, as in the poster I analyzed, the dark and mysterious themes present in the movie. The green glow of both the text and the Matrix code make them look markedly artificial, and create stark contrast between the protagonists of the film up front and the products of their robotic enemy. I chose these specific elements and techniques in an attempt to bring light to what I felt were the most interesting themes in the movie. By careful use of specific lighting effects, colors, and certain characters and objects from the film, I believe this goal was masterfully achieved.
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Date Issued
2009-03
Extent
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Poster