I started this assignment with high expectations. I was going to make a movie poster into something animated.

Making a poster even more epic? Definitely going to be good.

I researched some posters of movies that came out this year on IMdB.

After browsing around for awhile, I picked two posters that I thought would be easy, but also could be animated in a way that makes sense.

For the Prometheus one, I had planned on making her flashlight turn on and off, sort of like how it happened in the movie.

For Zero Dark Thirty, using the poster for inspiration, I would put a gif behind the words.

I started with the Zero Dark Thirty poster first.

The Steps

First, I needed to remove her photo from behind the words.

I figured the easiest way to do this was to use the background eraser.  I tried using the Quick Selection Tool to select the inside of each letter, but when the letters had black marks on the inside of the letter (like the “O”), it took the entire letter out.

So, I was stuck with using the Background Eraser. And boy was that hard.

The blue areas were easy. Her face and hair and dark shirt on the other hand… took me an hour. I wanted to preserve the quality of the lettering, so I had to be super careful with the Tolerance level.

After getting most of the photo behind the lettering gone, I had to go back in and use the Erase Block to get the darker spots that even Tolerance couldn’t help.

I ended up with this.

The checkered part is the transparency.

Then, Adobe fought back. It crashed and left me staring at my computer in complete dismay.

I let it do its thing and just waited until I felt my computer could try to open Photoshop again.

I tweeted while I waited.

Photoshop just crashed on me when I tried to make my movie poster gif. 2 hours gone. UGH. #ds106 #gonnagocrynow

— Brooke Parker (@bparker5) February 21, 2013

Finally, I got up the courage to click on the shortcut on my desktop and wished with everything in me that it would come back. If I knew how to speak whale, I may have sounded a lot more like Dory.

Photoshop said it had recovered something!

YESYESYES.

Alas, it didn’t recover everything. I had lost about an hour’s worth of work.

I didn’t feel like going through it all again, though. So, I sucked it up and kept going with what it had recovered.

Making it into a GIF

I downloaded the trailer for Zero Dark Thirty with Fastest YouTube Downloader. Then I used MPEG Streamclip to trim it down and make a gif out of part of the trailer.

I then opened that gif in Photoshop.

I had no idea how to put the top image on top of the gif, though.

My only idea was to increase the Canvas size of the gif to the height of the poster. Then I copied the poster onto the gif and put it as a top layer.

That was it!

Ta da!

After making it into a gif, I realized you can’t even tell that I didn’t go back through and clean up the transparency.