Thursday, July 27, 2006

The Poster is Ready

Hurrah!

My own personal project during these initial months has been designing the production poster. This is going to be one of the first images a potential audience will see and we all felt it was important that the poster reflected the tone and scale of the production, as well as being a striking image which will grab people's attention.

We don't normally use photographic images for our productions, and very rarely do we opt for full colour, as cost can be prohibitive, but for something like His Dark Materials we are pushing the boat out.

Here is the final design.
The image has evolved tremedously in the many months it has taken to get to this point. The difficulty I found was that the plays are on such a huge scale it was tough to distil everything down to a single encapsulating image that did the production justice. A lot of discussion took place and a number of interesting ideas were offered by Damon, which eventually led to the final product.

At the end of the day I am pretty pleased with the final result. Poster design is something I enjoy a great deal, but I am completely self-taught in terms of creating the images, not being a particularly good artist, so it takes me a lot longer to get something I think we can work with.

I would be very keen to hear what you think of the design, and I look forward to seeing it printed and plastered all over Portsmouth.

Rehearsal Photos

Well, it's been a long while since this blog was updated, but we have now stopped for a summer break and rehearsals will resume in September. So this spare time has given me the opportunity to add some content to these pages, and here you can see some rehearsal photos. Martin (Will) is not only taking on one of the largest roles in the play, but he has also come to every rehearsal armed with his digital camera to create a pictorial record of how the production is shaping up. You can see a selection of his photos below.

Lyra encounters Iorek, cunningly disguised as a water-bottle!

Lord Boreal devoured by the Spectres


Damon directs David (Asriel), Vicky (Salcillia) and Charley (Lyra)


Constructing the Daemons...

...which begin to take on recognisable forms.



A mini coven of witches


Lyra with the Gyptians