Gruesome Yarns

Recently we had the opportunity to put together promotional work for Gruesome Yarns, appearing at the Wonderland Festival this November/December. Gruesome Yarns is a kid-friendly storytelling show, full of adventure and “mild grossout vibe” in the style of Roald Dahl. We had quite a bit of freedom to shape the image, and we worked closely with Amy Currie (AD of ImproMafia) to go from concept to execution through to finalisation.

In 5 days.

We identified a bunch of elements that you might find in stories like this – witches, bullies, factories, animals wearing clothes… (I felt very strongly there needed to be a mean boy with a big balloon floating away. Read in to that what you will.) Sourcing talent and costumes for something like this in this timeframe would be quite difficult. We hit on the idea of making a pop-up book, or something that looked like a pop-up book, where the storyteller is “real” but everything else is sketched and is part of the book. Production-wise, the concept now needed an artist, but didn’t require a whole host of costumed talent. Optimally we wanted something that looked like pen sketches with watercolour, Quentin Blake style.

Handily, Amy’s brother Edmund Currie is an incredibly talented artist. He took the brief and quickly turned around some concept sketches, collectively we tuned the concept, and he delivered the final watercoloured-sketched elements.

Here’s some of Edmund’s concept work and work-in-progress.

 

After some great watercolour-style work to complete the images, Edmund’s stuff looked amazing… and then it was time to see if we could do his work justice with some shooting and some photoshop!

Enter Sam Clifford, who happens to have an incredibly expressive face – he played the part of the storyteller.

With Sam’s character work under our belt, time to see if we could take Edmund’s excellent illustrations and make them in to a popup book! This was the first experiment to see how it would look, and the results were very promising…

Bringing it all together with foreground and background popup-book sketch elements, and Sam, worked very well!

The final result looks just right, and handily because the elements are all loose and able to be moved around, suits portrait or landscape orientation use.

Hats off to Amy and Sam, and PARTICULARLY to Edmund, who delivered such perfect artwork. As far as theatre promos go, this is one of my favourites.

Gruesome Yarns appears on Saturday 26 November and Saturday 3 December at the Brisbane Powerhouse. Tickets available at the Powerhouse website.