Photoshop Draft

Here is my draft!

Idea and Inspiration

I wanted to do a banner for my blog. I thought it would look good to have a welcome banner on the site. When thinking about what to make in Photoshop, I first thought about what relates to movies and film. Well, the answer is filmstrips, so that’s what I decided. I figured that filmstrips in and of themselves would need a little more substance. Otherwise, I would have a very dull banner. Looking at the filmstrips that I have, the ones that I didn’t take care of were scratched and weathered.

Design Process

So, I opted to give that weathered effect. Additionally, when people think of movies shot on film, they tend to think of older movies from the 50s or older, so having that weathered effect was a natural choice. The cameras in the film strips were, while not a camera that was used for filming movies is a nice-looking classic camera that worked with the black of the film strips. My initial design process was to see how everything fit. I drew up some lines with the ruler tool so that I could easily snap everything together. After trimming the cameras, I applied the weathered effect. Last, I worked on the text, given that my background consisted of dark images. I went with a white text to help contrast better. I also applied the glowing effect to not only help with readability but to give a projection effect too.

Technical Detail

I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted my banner to look like, so it was just a matter of finding a few images. Using Google Image search, I looked for weathered effects and film strips that were explicitly free to use and remix. I was fortunate to find a filmstrip with an already keyed out background. I did the same for the camera too, but that took some more thought, as I wasn’t sure what would work well in the center of the strips.
I didn’t encounter any issues when building this, mostly human errors. I placed in the camera images without cropping them first, which made the film when I turned it slightly transparent to show the edges of the pictures. Which required me to go back and trim and recopy each one. Moral of the story measure things before you start using them in Photoshop.

Sources and Materials