Typography

Creating Our Typography 

One of the most important parts of a film is a recognisable type face used across the promotional package. For horror films, this needs to be able to set the tone of the whole film. Often in supernatural horror films, serif type fonts are used to convey a religious attribute, however as ours has nothing to do with religion I thought a sans-serif font would be more fitting. I also wanted it to look modern to tie in with our internet theme, and definitely to incorporate the colour red as this is a key element within our trailer. We decided to make typography to look like a neon sign as we would be able to make this light up red. I got inspiration from this sign for the film 'Hostel Part 3'. 

 

I started by deciding on a font. I chose to go with Beon-Medium as it was retro looking and looking like a style that would be used on actual neon lights. I used a grey stone wall as a background and darkened it so I could later on increase the lighting around the sign. 

Then, on a new layer i renamed 'clouds', I went to filter > render > clouds. 

Putting this layer into the blend mode divide then gives the background more three dimensional lighting. 

Following on, I duplicated the text layer and rasterized it before applying a gaussian blur to this layer of 30 pixels to create a glow around the edge of the text. 

I then went back to the original text layer and applied all of the following layer styles. These are to make the text look like a neon light rather than just flat text. 

The result looks like this: 

Then, I went back to the clouds layer and took a soft-edged brush of 500 pixels and erased around the edges of the text to make it lighter in the middle to seem as though the sign is lighting up the background. 

I further increased this vignette effect by using a black fill layer and a layer mask. 

To increase the realism of the sign, I wanted to add a cord running behind the letters. I did this by using the pen tool to create a wavy line and then the stroke path feature to colour this in black. I then used the following layer style and darkened the image to make it subtle and have the correct lighting. 

I then wanted to drastically increase the glow around the sign, so using the 500 pixel brush again I drew all around the sign. 

I then changed the blend mode to soft light and decreased the opacity slightly until I was happy with it. 

While I felt this looked good, I wanted to make the genre clearer by including more elements of horror. First, I applied two overlays to make the overall image look grittier; one that applied to the whole image and one that applied to just the text. 

To make the sign appear broken, I used the marquee tool to select just the letter 'D' and made it into its own layer. I rotated this slightly to make it look as though the letter had fallen. 

I then used a fill layer applying only to this letter in the blend mode 'darken' and decreased the opacity to make it look like the light had also stopped functioning. I also erased some of the glow around it. I did the same thing to one of the segments on the letter 'M'. 

Finally, I downloaded some blood splatter brushes and created a layer above the background to darken patches on the wall. 

Here is the finished typography:

Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome but I think the glitches on the letters look slightly off so I would want to improve them later on. Also, for our website and trailer, I would like to animate the letter D so it swings on its hinge and make the lights flicker slightly, but this will have to be done later on at school where I have access to the rotation keyframe feature in Photoshop CS6 because I only have CS5 at home.