Here's a behind-the-scenes for the 2009
Watchmen film. I'll make a separate post for the recent HBO series in a little while.
At first glance at my cover, it might be assumed that I just shifted a few characters around from this piece of poster art...
[attachment=43994:01_watch...original.jpg]
...and that assumption would be understandable. There's not too much in the way of "groundbreaking" arrangement in my keyart. But I wanted there to a bit more variety in the scale of some characters, pushing Rorschach to the obvious forefront and having others a bit further back in space. The retail art keeps them all relatively the same size, which is fine but I wanted a bit more "pop."
In order to get each character isolated so that I could shift them around, I needed to mask out each one of them and fill in the "blanks" where the figures overlapped. While it might be excessive, I prefer to have a "full" version of the character to work with, so that I have a lot of freedom to move them around wherever I want them, without worrying about parts of the original image that aren't there. Luckily, alternate versions of the same images popped up in other posters (see below) so I was able to fuse most of the missing pieces back in where they belong. In other areas in which I couldn't clone, a simple "fade to black" gradient seemed to do the trick.
[attachment=43996:01_watchmen_fixes.jpg]
For Dr. Manhattan, I merged one of the only promotional images I could find with the legs of a 3D model image from a Google Search. Since he's a CGI character, it's harder to find many publicity images of him because he doesn't actually "exist" to be photographed. I couldn't find any hands that would fit his pose, and knowing that they would likely be obscured anyway, I saved the time and skipped them. If I were to need them for some reason in the future, I could probably find stock images or even take photos of my own hands to use, but for this case, I didn't bother.
I also hate the obnoxious blue/teal/yellow filters that have been applied to the first image above, so I wanted to fix that and bring in some of the natural colors. That meant using the Camera Raw filter to try to reverse-engineer the filtering that had been done, and then going in and recoloring portions or the entirety of the characters to bring them back to their original hues.
For Nite Owl's cape, I used the trusty old Supergirl cape renders from Cinema4D that I created for the DC Crossover keyart. Those fabric simulations will be the gifts that keep on giving!
[attachment=43997:02_watch...acters01.png]
[attachment=43998:03_watch...acters02.png]
The rest fell together pretty easily... adding in the requisite sparks, debris, rain, water droplet splashes (thanks, ctaulbee!), and lighting effects to create the finished keyart you see below...
[attachment=43999:04_watchmen_keyart.jpg]
For the back cover, I created a new "smiley face" button in Cinema 4D using a pre-existing model from TurboSquid (no
Watchmen-related squid pun intended). I wanted a certain amount of reflectiveness and gloss to the button, so I played around with the texture, material, and lighting to get it the way I wanted it.
[attachment=44000:05_watchmen_badge.jpg]
Then I added the face and blood drip (along with some additional re-coloring and lighting) in Photoshop.
[attachment=44001:05_watch...badge_02.png]
And because I felt that the bright, yellow button was just a bit too distracting to the overall cover, I placed it inside of a "Doomsday Clock" with a blue brick wall texture behind it. This helped to shrink the button and make it less of an immediate focal point. On its own, the yellow button was just too big and an eyesore.
[attachment=44002:05_watch...badge_03.png]
One of the unfortunate things about my new cover is that the pile of papers on the back cover aren't as obvious as I had hoped. I wanted them to be small, so they would look like a giant pile, but what's actually on those pages becomes too difficult to discern at such a small size.
On the
Watchmen cover (and the motion comic and 2019 series), those papers are pages from Rorschach's Journal. I copied the text from Alan Moore's graphic novel and arranged them on a journal page, using the Dave Gibbons Journal font from ComiCraft. There are 15 different pages total, below is an example of four of them. I used the Trapcode Particular plug-in in Adobe After Effects to turn each page into a custom particle, then duplicate them, then pile them all up.
[attachment=44005:06_rorsc..._journal.png]
On the
Tales of the Black Freighter cover, I switched things up and made the pages be excerpts from
Under the Hood, the "book within a book" by Hollis Mason from the original Watchmen graphic novel. Since the faux
Under the Hood documentary is also included on the Black Freighter disc, I felt this would provide it some level of representation. There are 14 different pages total but they are arranged using the same Trapcode Particular settings, so while the pile might look the same as the
Watchmen cover, the individual sprites are actually different.
[attachment=44006:06_under_the_hood.png]
Overall, I'm quite pleased with the result and think it's definitely a much-needed improvement from my previous version! I hope you'll agree!
Old Cover:
[attachment=44003:dcfs_wat...bd_cover.jpg]
New Cover:
[attachment=44007:dcfs_wat...bd_cover.jpg]
Thanks for reading! I'll post some inside-looks at the HBO
Watchmen cover in a few days!
