benjamin alexander smith

Rootes film poster

In 2005 I left home for the first time and went to study at the University of Warwick. I lived in the halls of residence best known for partying, socializing and drinking: Rootes. Luckily enough, I got allocated a room in "New Rootes", a newly constructed block with the same rent, same atmosphere, same people, but better rooms.

The first term I spent in L2 (L-block, second floor) was incredible. I met some of my best friends there, had an unbelievably good time and started off not only my university career but my life beyond the family home. Unsurprisingly, the people I lived with meant a lot to me. Many of them still do.

Mid-way through the term I began to mess around with Photoshop, modifying photos to achieve a cut-out effect I'd discovered and grown fond of in early 2005. After a while I showed the images I'd created to a few of my room-mates, and their encouragement spurred me on to produce portrait images in this style for every person in the L2 kitchen.

Once I had these images it was only a matter of time before I turned them into a full-size poster. The punny name stuck, and the Rootes film poster was born.

Reflections

This poster was great fun to produce, and looking back it conjures up some happy memories of my first term at uni. I liked it so much that in 2007 I got it printed on glossy paper at A1 size and used it as a poster in my lounge. It looks even better at full-size than I could've hoped.

In hindsight, this project taught me a very valuable lesson: always backup your work, keep the files you use to produce a final product, and never delete old work. Since rediscovering the PSD for the poster on an old CD, I've been dying to make a new version for housemates I've had in the meantime. However, the portrait PSDs were combined to form the final poster and the process I went through to produce the original effect is lost forever.

I may have made some mistakes when messing with my filesystems, but all in all, this project was a definite success.