Evolution of an idea

I recently created a poster for the Bettendorf boys basketball team.  It was my first time working with them and they left everything up to me to come up with an idea.  They have a new coach this year and I wanted to create something that would show off the fact that it was the beginning of something new without doing something that has been done a million times before.

I was inspired by the image of the soldiers raising the flag of Iwo Jima.  I hope that using that image for inspiration will be seen as a tribute to those soldiers and help inspire more people to be interested in and remember those events.  While creating the poster I wanted to keep that same dynamic shape that the soldiers had created while raising the flag yet stray from it as much as possible in order to keep that historic image unique.

I started off with a quick sketch on paper.  I knew that there was going to be 6 seniors hoisting the hoop into the air and wanted to get a rough idea I was actually going to be able to fit them. 

Next I opened up photoshop and began building my idea. My first idea was to have them standing on piles of broken gym floor boards - as if they were rebuilding an entire gym. Before I went through all the work of actually creating or capturing a broken gym floor I went to some stock sites to see if I could try a sample pile of broken boards to give me a better idea of what it would look like and if it was what I wanted. I also dropped in a sky. I then quickly drew some stick figures to see what approximate size they would need to be.

 

Then I began extracting them from the green screen and placing them in the scene.  One problem that I ran into was that when they were holding the basketball hoop they were all at different angles.  So I had to do some extra careful positioning in order to get them to fit. 




Yes, I actaully have a full sized hoop in my studio!  (though it has been set on fire and the backboard shattered for other  crazy projects)

I also tried a lightning sky to see if I wanted a really stormy sky in the background but I felt it distracted too much from the players.

In my final version I felt it needed to be even further simplified so instead of a pile of boards I simply painted a black hill. Fog and a forest of basketball hoops faiding into the distance completed the scene.