Design Project - Far Cry 5 Poster (Patreon)

Sitting at home on a Thursday afternoon and this message pops up.  Production had ended on the Far Cry 5 - Baptism of Fire project at the Fury Fingers team was busy with the editing and effects for the final release.

I had already designed a logo for the film and had worked on posters and logos for previous projects. One of the previous projects had been Goons Inc for which I designed a Hollywood style character-based poster and Nick (the director) wanted something similar for 'Baptism of Fire'.  

So first thing I did was grab the main cast shots, I had already put these images aside when compiling promo assets for the film. We had taken photos of lots of game characters that don't appear in the film and considered using them but decided to stick to main cast.

Ranger, the main character so had to be the central figure and larger than the other characters. I just layered and positions the supporting characters around him. I had to flip the image of Pilot Nick for the design but just used layer masks to roughly blend the characters into the composition. This first mock-up was was done after about 10 minutes.

One of the main issues I had was having limited shots of the Father character Joseph Seed, and the image I wanted to use was a very bright daytime image where the others had a darker feel so the colour temperature was quite different. I also wished he was holding the book higher, one to fit in the space better (because the straight out to the side pose limited the both the size and position of the image) and secondly the arm up higher would balance the position of the plane propeller on the opposite side of the poster. While I tried a couple of quick edits it wasn't looking right so I didn't persist .

I had considered using the last supper image along the bottom this meant I wouldn't need the top shot of Joseph but thought this made the poster a bit too busy, but I did decide to keep the sinner in the poster as he is such an iconic figure.

 Next was to start cleaning up the design so I took each image and masked out the characters where I needed. Each character element was setup as  two layers, one with the isolated characters pictured below and one was the full images, this way using a layer mask I could paint back in more of the background where needed. 

To fill in the rest of the poster and give texture I found an Edens Gate flag that the cult use.

 This was the final photo composition. I ended up extending the sky and cliff from the image of Joseph and used as the background for the top of the poster, plus looked odd having the cliff and sky end around Rangers head and work well with Nick on the other side looking up into the sky. This also let me use the planes from the original last supper key art because I had a sky to place them in and they filled the hole there nicely.  

Next to tie the composition together a bit more I made a couple of coloured overlays this harmonised the lights and darks a bit more. Then I ran a slight brush stroke effect over the entire design to stylise it a bit making it look more like a single an illustration similar to all the famous eighties movie posters. 

Last to really give it the old movie poster look I grabbed a a folder paper texture from Spike the Swede on DeviantArt

https://spiketheswede.deviantart.com/art/Paper-Texture-2-135238697

Along with some grunge and halftone layers from my resources library I worked up an aged overlay for the poster.  

 
Which brings us to the final design, all in all was about an hours work the majority of which was spent masking out the characters. 

You can see the film on youtube here - https://youtu.be/lLAaJL03lFU