Monika’s 2016 Studio Session

by DancePerformance

Each year one of the highlights is photographing the amazing dancers from Monika’s Unlimited Dance Studio. It’s a massive day, with lots of little ones and older more accomplished students. These are some of our favourite images from the day – we love pulling the lights back and doing great dramatic images. Congratulations to all of the students on a fantastic concert too – the concert photos will be available from January 9.

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Brisbane Arts Theatre – 2016 Productions

by PerformanceTheatre

In 2016 we continued our relationship with the Brisbane Arts Theatre, photographing many of their main stage productions as well as their iconic children’s productions. Production shoots like this usually take place on the last or second-to-last rehearsal before the production opens, so lighting, staging, costumes etc are all pretty much right, and the images are a good likeness of what patrons will see when they come to the show. We photograph headshots of the cast for the programme, and you will often see the production photos in media when the first reviews start rolling in.

Here are some of our favourites from the 2016 season.

JP-003-T1615_20160919_A0554The band from Jurassic Park: The Musical – wedged in to the tiniest of spaces, accessible by ladder only, backstage.JP-067-T1615_20160919_A0044Nathan Pamenter nailing Denis Nedry’s characterJP-087-T1615_20160919_A0216Something bad is about to happen in Jurassic Park: The MusicalT1601_20160114_B0407

Cameron Smith in Baby and the Bathwater

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The makeup and costume work for The Jungle Book absolutely blew my mind!T1603_160317_A0936T1603_160317_B1342Kyoko killing it as Kaa in The Jungle BookT1606_160428_A4974

Nathan Pamenter doesn’t generally look like the hulk. I may have altered his headshot somewhat.

T1606_160428_A5250Victoria Costa playing Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served?T1606_160428_B5588T1606_160428_B5805T1607_160518_B8393

The cast of CinderellaT1607_160518_C8551T1607_160518_C9232Unrequited love.T1613_160728_A6559Christopher Batkin was absolutely superb in Equus.T1613_160728_A6578T1613_160728_A6860T1613_160728_A7128T1613_160728_A7220T1616_161005_A0299T1616_161005_A0657The Guards from Guards Guards!T1616_161005_A0725Lierre Beutel shows off her creation ErrolT1616_161005_A1025T1622_161117_A2433Norman Doyle, incredible in When The Rain Stops FallingT1622_161117_A2660Claire Argente and John Benetto face off in When The Rain Stops FallingT1622_161117_A2723Claire again, this time with Jon Devitt. The stage and lighting for When The Rain Stops Falling was incredible.T1622_161117_A2887

Gruesome Yarns

by IllustrativePerformanceTheatre

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.

photo-23-11-16-11-04-31-pmIn 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.

 

fb4c3dbebf3fadc384105936f24feb8213589104_10154349592254586_879313160_o13639849_10154351368904586_70415143_oAfter 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.

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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…

t1611_160710_a5629eBringing it all together with foreground and background popup-book sketch elements, and Sam, worked very well!

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t1611_160710_a5629e-3The 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.
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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.