All About Style

When creating promotional assets for Containment, I wanted to achieve a very specific style. The base images I was given didn’t exactly exude horror, sci-fi, or aliens. To get there, I did a lot of image editing in Photoshop.

Here’s what the image looked like before and after I got my hands on it. For context, this kid was the unfortunate subject of an alien brain slug, and spent most of his time creeping out the government agents.

I edited our color to give everything a creepy blue tint, though I kept in some contrasting red from the door. Then, I displaced slices of the image to create a glitching effect. Finally, there’s a layer of thin lines across the whole thing to give the feeling that the viewer is looking through something like an old-school security camera.

Told Through Tech

Containment was entirely told from within the world of a phone. If we saw actors, it was because they were on a video call. Sometimes we’d see them text or record their surroundings, but it was all as if the viewer’s phone screen was the character’s phone screen.

That technology base influenced how I designed the promo materials. Everything looks like you’re seeing it through a screen of some kind, and I took full advantage of creepy technology tropes by including glitching and unnatural lighting.