The Fake Hallmark Movie Poster

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to present the fake Hallmark movie poster…

That’s right–Rachel is starring in a movie, and this is the movie poster.

Well, she wishes. Really, this was just a nice excuse to take some new profile pictures for social media, but here’s the cool thing:

The Images Behind the Fake Hallmark Movie Poster

While the pictures I used in this fake movie poster were of me, I also took the pictures! That’s right, this was a self-portrait session. And it was so much fun!!

To create this fake movie poster, I used two different images in Photoshop. Here are the images, and I’ll explain a little bit more about how it all came together:

The Story Behind the Fake Movie Poster Idea

First of all, I came up with the idea for this movie poster based on the fact that a lot of movies, especially Hallmark movies, about girls my age tend to center on them finding a romantic relationship, and I thought I’d change that up a little. I had fun with the title and subtitle, with them coming together to say that she was looking for something and it wasn’t a man, and she found it. I wanted an old-fashioned, vintage sort of a feel so I chose the lace dress and flowers. The final result was very Hallmark-style, which is what I was going for! The Hallmark vibes are definitely there…only this time, it wasn’t a man 😉

The Process

I live in an apartment complex that’s in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and we have this giant weed patch right by our apartment, so I went there to take the pictures. It was golden hour, and the weeds were a perfect, lovely golden-tan color. I set up my self-timer and my tripod, and got to taking pictures for the movie poster. I took some up close, and some far away, as shown in the pictures above. The light was perfect, and even my SOOC (straight out of camera) pictures weren’t half bad. I was thrilled, because I’m rarely satisfied with pictures of myself.

Editing!!!!

After shooting several angles and facial expressions, etc., it was time to edit. Now, I LOVE editing. It’s my passion. I think it’s so cool to see something with your eyes that’s BEAUTIFUL, take a picture which doesn’t quite do it justice, and edit that picture to be what you actually saw with your eyes. That’s one of my biggest goals with editing, because our eyes catch so much that our cameras don’t always! My basic edits for this fake Hallmark movie poster shoot included making them much warmer by changing the temperature/white balance, darkening the shadows and raising the highlights, and sharpening the images.

Here’s a before and after:

Ummm yeah, I LOVE editing! (If you want to see more of my editing on YOUR pictures, reach out to me!) Then in Photoshop when I actually went to create my movie poster, I selected and masked myself from this image and put it over the other image (included earlier in this post). One thing I didn’t love was that I got the half-constructed building in the background, and so I wanted to put this image on top of another one.

I don’t know if this will ever become a movie, but it was fun to be a movie star for a day. And the movie poster? I’ll have THAT forever. 🙂