"It's Urgent" - Recreating the Title (Part 2)

Three posts to go, YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

I probably shouldn't complain about writing blog posts on my blog, so don't take that as a complaint. Take it as a celebration---I have three more posts to write, great! Amazing. Stupendous. Just kidding, not really. I don't even know what I'm saying. Let's just start Photoshopping.

Anyway, here's a close up of the actual Insurgent movie poster. I tried resizing the image into A2 but the iMac crashed so probably not the best idea. Plus it wasn't high res anyway, and it's not simply a matter of switching out a few faces or components, but I had to change the poses too, so resizing and then editing is not the best idea.

The new and improved title! Photoshopping something like a title simply does not work, so I went on Google and downloaded Klein Slabserif (plus the bold, italic etc. versions) as it was labelled as the one closest to the original Insurgent font.

I used this tutorial to cut and move the upper half of the title. If you see the original title you'll notice that it sort of had a "landslide" effect. Well, landslide probably isn't the best description but I'll go with that for now.

Although the tutorial calls for you to Expand..., Expand Appearance works just fine. I think this is because I had put gradients in.

This is what the options looked like when I removed the gradient:

And when I had it on:

Okay, let's just remove the gradient first and go with Expand... because we are letter-cutting virgins here, people. We'll be cautious.

Let's draw a line. You can always go in with the Direct Selection tool to micro-manage. In this case, we want a slanted line. A landslide line.

I love this screenshot for no apparent reason. It's just like when they say politicians are humans too, or teachers are humans too, or students are humans too and need an adequate amount of sleep. Well, letterforms are objects too. The New York School graphic designers got something right there.

Look at that castrated "U"!

AAAAAHH! The letterforms! They're rebelling!

This is a beautiful moment. I swear I shed tears of joy inside when this worked. I must've thought something like, "Maybe I can sleep at 2 am tonight instead of 3:30." It was a wonderful feeling, people.

The final look. Gorgeous. By the way, I got the "Real 3D" thing on Google Images. It's originally an .svg file, but I couldn't open that, so I had to settle on an image. Pretty good quality, didn't break much when resized.

I was using this tutorial to create a light strobe in Illustrator, but to be honest, it didn't help much. Maybe I was distracted or maybe we existed in different Adobe dimensions, not sure. The video was kind of hard to follow because there was no vocal instructions, which as a n00b is an absolute must to me. Mostly I just winged it.

So the tutorial called for a radial gradient thing...

... roughly the height and length of your strobe...

... preferably a tame gradient and not this scary UFO-like thing which gives me mental scabs every time I look at it...

So yeah. Gave up after about 40 minutes of struggling with that. New strategy.

That looks like a sad flat line. It's like a Smurf spaghetti.

The tutorial showed something with Blend tool and different-coloured strobes, so I tried that, plus a little Outer Glow... or was it Gaussian Blur?

At that point I just wanted cheese popcorn and a hug.

Screw that too, it just looked weird. Like a gradient line but that's it. No neon strobing. Onto Plan C...

No idea what this screenshot is trying to say. I wish screenshots could talk, like, "Oh yes, I was created at 8:53 pm on Tuesday, 31st of February. You were trying to circumvent Indonesia's internet barriers and go on PornHub."

Aaaaaah. I was trying to join paths?

At least I remember this part. Offset Path was annoying. There was no way to reverse, like when you want to create columns and rows in InDesign and they ask you whether you want to "remove existing guidelines", to which you always reply "YES THANK YOU!" It's like applying foundation on week-old makeup. That shit's nasty. Or maybe there was some way to do so (History panel?) but at that point I just wanted a room made out of mattresses. You know one of those padded rooms they put crazy people in? At the time, I would've given anything to sleep in one of those rooms.

This reminds me of the Israel flag. Or Norway. Danish? Finland? Regardless, I was much more interested in the positive-negative play on space than the actual project. This may have led to zoning out for a couple of minutes.

Back at it again with the Blend tool and different strokes. I guess I convinced myself that if I made it small enough, maybe it could work! I swear this was 0.002p or something. That was the absolute limit and you couldn't go smaller. Trust me, I tried.