Trent Airlines Fake Ad Poster

This project was designed to take place over 18 days. My goal was to work on this poster every day. This was the first of this type of matte painting that I did, and working on it every day encouraged me to get better at it.

The premise of this poster is a humorous idea that flying in planes is safer than taking boats because the sea is full of sea monsters. My plan of action was to use Adobe Dimension to pose tentacles to wrap up the boat. Then I would composite and paint over the tentacles to mesh them with the scene.

To the right is a shot of my sketch. You can see from looking at it that I had several different poses for the tentacles. This became more complicated as the project went on. (I had already chosen the boat and background, that’s why they look so dead on.)

An obvious limitation for this project is that I wanted it to be legal, and for this poster, that meant using free sources. So the pictures are from Pixabay.com, and the tentacle model that I used is from free3d.com.

This proved to be a more significant challenge than I expected. My original sketch had several different poses, but the model that I got only had one position, so I had to get creative in Dimension to make each tentacle seem different. In the first few days, I focused on trying to get the arms to look the way that I wanted (such as materials. That’s why day 4 looks like they are made of legos.), and the following days were more detail work. A fun aspect of matte painting is that I took suckers from actual photos of tentacles, and I merged them with the 3d models to look real. (This is clearest from day 11 to day 12.)

I only included pictures from days where there were noticeable changes.

The poster isn’t perfect, and I’d change a few things if I did it again, but I learned a lot along the way. I’m looking forward to making more of these in the future. If you like this, share it with your friends! It really helps.