Performance Project – Poster

turquoisecho

Dec 13

Right at the beginning of the project, I made some thumbnails for poster ideas and took some photos using lighting, silhouette and painted newsprint.

These are some of the images I took with no filters or editing. For coloured lighting, I set my iPad to max brightness and just showed colour screens of either green or pink.

Today I sat back down and let the process lead me. I will show the process and make some notes. Please note that the images are small and low-quality as this is just intended to evidence process, and a high quality final is at the end.

I started by darkening the background and altering it in different ways. One of my overlays on a mad colour dodge layer created this highly saturated look, and I thought it really suited the rainbow, pantomime mood that the production has taken on. I enlarged the leaf a little and the edge begins to interact with the dodge layer, creating more visual interest.

I experiment with distort and crop to create some different compositions. I did more than just these, trying it on the other side and playing a bit more with colour. When I went back through the images with fresh eyes I thought that the heavily distorted one on the right was strongest and most interesting at first glance.

I thought the font Rory used on the official poster was strong, and went for a similar one. This is a square, thick, evenly weighted font. I think it works because the poster is so saturated and wacky that simple black text is best for grounding and legibility. I then resized some of the text and played with placement of details - I didn't catch pictures, but legibility was worse if the details were placed on the right hand side as the vertical leaf's edge cut through the text. The pun... well, I like to think I struck a balance between zany, funny and surreal, like the performance itself.

I love the character of the silhouetted caterpillar here, as it leaves a little mystery, and the lighting mimics sun coming from behind a leaf. The silhouette also follows other show poster conventions, as I saw from my research and collecting examples on Pinterest.