Night of the Living Dead

Shooting and creating this image was some of the most fun I have had with photography. I was really excited about the subject material and wanted to do a really good job recreating the movie poster. Halloween is my absolute favorite time of the year, I’m a huge horror fan and I adore George Romero’s work, so all of these things combined to get me super motivated. I feel like I could go on and on for ages about all the intricacies of this image and all of the time and work that went into creating it (far more than I’d like to admit), but I’ll try to keep it brief.

As stated, this image is a recreation of a movie poster for “Night of the Living Dead.” The poster is a painting and it’s decently old, so there were a lot of challenges, such as copying the lighting, arrangement, color scheme and biggest of all, perspective. The perspective in the poster is very exaggerated and it was really hard to mimic this without distorting the image too much. I don’t think mine has enough, but it looked bad when I made it more dramatic.

Another thing that was hard was making the movie title on the gravestone look realistic instead of like text plopped on top, and getting the lighting correct on it. I had a really hard time finding a close enough font to use as well. What I ended up doing was taking sections from the tombstone and cutting them out to fill in the letters and get the slightly ragged edges, textures and lighting. I also used a pattern overlay to emphasize the texture a bit more. I was surprised how long doing and figuring all of this out took. It seemed like such a straightforward element that I kind of wasn’t thinking about when shooting the images, but it is one of the small details that is important to the bigger picture and I really wanted to get it right.

The background is a bunch of images of people that I already had taken at previous other points in time that I used to create the looming zombies. I tried to make them darker and more blurred the further back they are, until the very front row which is visible and in focus. at a glance it is supposed to look like normal people, but I did a number of things to make them look more zombielike.

The middleground is composed of multiple different photographs from the graveyard, spliced together to create enough tombstone density to match the original. I also added in some fog to make it more moody and dreary like the original image. This was one of the last things I added to the image and I’m not 100% sure it looks realistic or good enough, but I was extremely crunched for time due to a plethora of problems and obstacles I encountered, and I ended up deciding it was more true to the original with the fog.

The zombies and the girl (who ended up being me) look more modern than the ones in the poster, which shows the difference in times of when they were made, most notably clothing and hairstyles, which I actually really like. It’s a small twist on the original to make it unique and to be reflective of the zombies and people of its own time.

Overall, this photo has probably the most editing and the most different images combined into one than I have ever made before. I feel like I began noticing a trend I’ve been taking while I was working on this one. I’ve been straying away a bit from “taking” images or shooting scenes and focusing more on “making” them and digitally editing them. I’m not really sure how I feel about this. I certainly don’t feel like it’s something negative- I’m gaining more knowledge of how to use editing programs, getting good practice and having a lot of fun working outside the box and getting creative, but I know this goes completely against how I’ll likely be spending my working career- photojournalism. I’m not even sure if that’s really my favorite style to work with, because I find great joy in creating “real" illusions and scenes and photographing the real world, but I have been having a blast on this tangent and anyway think it’s great to develop both skill sets, because the more and more I’ve been working with photography, the more I could see myself having a large variety of photo-centric careers. It’s fun to be able to alter reality and bend the images to fit my visions and I’m really glad I’m getting this experience.