As someone who's passionate about game design and its industry, I wanted to represent an upcoming video game for my event poster project. I stumbled upon "Alone in the Dark" by THQ Nordic, which is a psychological horror game coming out January 16, 2024. It was a particularly alluring option for its southern gothic and dark themes with underlying jazz elements (as noticed in the game's trailer release). The end goal was to achieve the dark southern gothic tone, along with the apparent supernatural elements, for the title card and make it look as legitimate as if it were a press release poster. 

I started with researching a background to establish my southern gothic setting, so I looked to images of parts of Louisiana. I found one of an abandoned church there, and made sure the resolution was large enough to translate well to the 16" x 20" poster, which would be the same for all elements I'd be adding to the Photoshop document. Then, I found sample stock images for a stormy sky with lightning and octopus tentacles for the supernatural element of my project. For the game title, I wanted to replicate the same font used for the actual game release, which I used a sample screenshot for Adobe Fonts to find a similar font. I ended up using Pressio No. 25 Black Compressed Ext for my display title, and Georgia Regular Bold as my Sans Serif complementary subtitle font. I introduced the game title along with its release date, the starring actors as their characters in the game, a tagline for THQ Nordic who are the developers behind the game along with their game website, and png/masked logos of the platforms the game will be available on.

I performed masking on the walkway of the abandoned church, to replace with the stormy sky with lightning. To achieve the appearance of a rising portal from a supernatural realm, I blended the hues and saturations I changed for my layers with the Brush tool on 0% hardness with variations of opacity. This was to emulate the shining light bleeding out of the portal and into the church. The light is angled in a way that performs a one-perspective, which I looked to examples from Stanley Kubrick diagrams.I had also used the same Brush tool in black (with low opacity) behind all of the text to simulate a drop shadow and emphasize the darkness of the room. For the layers where I used the Brush tool, I refined my work using the eraser at large scale, 0% hardness, and very low capacity to achieve a more realistic light display. I used variations of selection with the Magic Wand and Quick Selection tools to crop out the tentacles, so that I can place them in a position where they are popping out of the portal. To finalize the vibe and theme, I took character art of Jodie Comer and David Harbour, cropped them out, changed their hue/saturation to black, and turned down their opacity to a low percentage to simulate their shadows, which I put on alternate side of the title respective to the position of their starring names. It's if the characters are standing behind what can be seen in front of the viewer.