It was 1994. Film posters had been a regular part of my pre-digital working life for some time. As a rule, these were adaptations of pre-existing key art & usually the main reason for us doing anything at all was to adapt the portrait American “one sheet” poster to the standard UK “quad” poster, which had a landscape format.

Occasionally, though, we got to do something a little more interesting.

When Le Colonel Chabert came along, I had been using Photoshop for less than a year & in fact Layers had not long been introduced. Yes, you read that correctly, the first version of Photoshop I used didn’t even have layers. (Now that was a workflow which involved jumping through some hoops, I can tell you!) Photoshop v3, the first version with layers, came out in September 1994, the same month as Le Colonel Chabert & I honestly can’t remember whether I had layers available to me when I did this or not. I certainly don’t have a layered file in my archive. In any case, I had taken to Photoshop like a duck to water, so I just jumped through the necessary hoops to get it done.

We came up with a design that required me to extend a high res scan of a 35mm transparency out to the width of the poster.

Below you can see my final extended image followed by the original image & the film poster we ended up with.

To this day I’m still very proud of it. I’ll tell you what, though, there’s no way I’d do a shadow on Gérard’s hat like that again!