Changing the Front Page of A Newspaper

mb72378

mb72378

Well-known member
Hi all,

I have a new one for ya. I am needing to add a story to the front of a newspaper for a short film. The film requires that I have a picture and a story of a car accident on the front page of a paper that is sitting on a dresser. I can stage a picture and write a story but I need some ideas on how to take a regular newspaper and change what is on the front to make it look real. It doesn't have to be a digital fix, just something that will get the job done and look REAL. Thanks for the help and I look forward to reading what you guys (and gals) think.

Matt
 
If you have a local print shop or one near by, I'm sure it wouldn't cost very much to print one off, just give them a .pdf or .ai file if you have illustrator and they'll print one off for you dirt cheap. It will be way easier than trying to put on in there in post, and it'll look much better anyways
 
Yeah, I have CS3. There is a local printing company near by. So they can print me something that will look just like a newspaper? I thought that you would need some huge press or something?
 
If its just the cover page you're looking for I'm sure it won't be a problem, most printing companies can print off poster's and such, so I'm sure a newspaper sized image wouldn't be a problem. Just ask them if they have some sort of light paper stock that would be close to a newspaper
 
I needed to do a newspaper for a film once. I bought a book of art newsprint and tore out a page. Folded it in half, and it fit into my printer. All I needed to print was the top half of the page -- what would be seen above the fold. I then tore out a bunch more pages and folded them. Added my printed and folded page to the top, and had my newspaper. It was a little bit smaller than a real newspaper, but it worked fine for my shoot.

Good luck!
 
if the newspaper is not moving, create something that looks like a newspaper with the correct text and layout, and then do a corner pin. Done.

If the camera is moving, put a small square of red or other colored material on it, motions track the corners for position, rotation, and perspective. Done. You don't have to print anything. I'd simply scan a piece of newspaper or take a photo from directly above, tweak little things like gamma and luminosity to match and use that.
 
Couple suggestions:

1) Kinkos has large format printers if you want to print your own page. Last year we picked up some newsprint paper at an art supply store and got Kinkos to load it so we could print some large sheets. In the end, though, we used the next option:

2) Buy newsprint that fits your own printer. Scan the portion of the front page where you'll want the story. Alter that image in PhotoShop and print on your newsprint. Cut out and use sprayfix to paste your story on your newspaper. Though the paper stock will not match exactly, ours read ok on video. You also can use this approach to piece together the whole front page if you wish to avoid the matching issue.

3) You can get full pages of back issues of newspapers from www.newspaperARCHIVE.com as pdf files. All of those newspaper articles on the serial killer's wall in REKINDLED were PhotoShopped pdf files that we pulled from that site to make the clippings. If you don't want to scan your own newspaper you could pull some of those pdfs down and open in PhotoShop to alter them like we did.

4) There are a number of services on line that will print a whole mock newspaper for you. I typed "Print Your Own Newspaper" in google and got THIS first thing. Looks like you can get two 8 page newspapers printed for 39 bucks. I've seen this type of service at various fairs and amusement parks too. If you search a little I'm sure you'd find several other vendors. Here's these guys sample:

fake_newspaper_map1.gif
 
Thanks all for your comments. I will look into every option. When the point comes to shoot the film I will make sure to post up a grab of the scene so you can see what I did.
 
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