Category Archives: Publicity stills

Musicals, Musicians, Opera, Portraits, Posters, Publicity stills, Theatre

Ello Princess

For a while, now, I’ve been searching for a chance to do some theatre advertising shots using a really, really classic look that doesn’t get seen much beyond magazine editorials these days because it’s a bit retro.

So when I was asked to shoot the publicity for Gilbert and Sullivan’s seldom-seen Princess Ida at the Finborough, and was told that all I had to work with was a headless and limbless torso and a big room, I jumped at the chance.

Simon Butteriss and Bridget Costello were my wonderfully in-character victims.

The show begins previews on 24 March.

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Musicals, Portraits, Publicity stills, Theatre

Rubble and rain

A railway arch, a pile of rubble, a lot of mud, an obstacle course to get to the location, an electrocution risk only avoided by a fortuitous last-minute equipment switch, a very wet producer, costume designer, actor and photographer, all to get some apt publicity shots of star Alastair Brookshaw for The Grand Tour. The escape-the-Nazis musical caper will open at the Finborough on 1 January. GrTour-001 GrTour-002 GrTour-003

From the archives, Posters, Publicity stills, Theatre

Don’t squash Louisa!

This one’s from a couple of years ago.

I was asked to shoot the poster image for A Broken Rose at the Cockpit Theatre with a very specific brief in mind.

The play was about a teenage girl who’d drawn herself so deep into her imagination to deal with her childhood that she could no longer see where reality ended and dreams began, with disastrous consequences.

And to advertise it, the producers wanted a classic Disney-type image: the wonderment of opening a storybook to have a fantasy world of light and colour pour out before your eyes.  But with a riff, in that the background to it all needed not to be Christmas trees and tinsel but something a bit “off”.

The graphic designer would deal with the sparks and whatever that needed to come out of the book.  I needed to come up with the rest.

Okeydoke, easy enough.  Light up her face with light coming out of a book.  How hard could it be to fake that?

Well, it turned out, after extensive testing on the cheapest model I know (namely, me), that getting the basic lighting right for what we wanted to do was fairly straightforward (if you discount the sheer number and variety of lights involved in what looks like a simple shot).

But on the book I was asking the wrong question.  Because faking light coming out of a book is very hard.  In fact, I suspect it’s impossible.

Rather easier, though, is not faking it.  And actually making the book light up.

Enter the largest book you have ever seen (so big it took two people to move it into the right position), a Stanley knife to gouge an enormous hole through the middle of it to stick a flash in, and the delightful and uncomplaining star of EastEnders, The Bill and loads more besides, Louisa Lytton, on whose poor knees the monster had to sit.

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Posters, Production photography, Publicity stills, Theatre

Death to the Finborough

If there’s one character who pervades every scene of Sommer 14 — A Dance of Death it is, as the title suggests, Death (note for the uninitiated: it’s not a ballet — a dance of death / Totentanz / danse macabre is a mediaeval literary genre centred around the fact we all die…).

German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s exploration of the events that led to the First World War gives us Death as a wild-eyed and innocent teenager who finds himself on the battlefields paying for the vanity of the European elite.

For the poster and advertising shoot we wanted to create imagery that conveyed three things: that Death was a German soldier, that Death was Death, and that Death was young and innocent and not who you’d expect.

Director Chris Loscher and designer Mike Lees solved the first problem by procuring a full-on German World War I outfit, complete with spiky helmet.

For making Death look like Death, it was for brilliant makeup artist Siwan Hill to work her magic and create a skull that left just enough human face behind to let us know there’s a boy back there.

And to make Death look young and innocent, we went to the font of all persons young and innocent but still old enough that you don’t need 18 child minders and security — people taking their GCSEs — for our (fantastically patient, fantastically willing and generally fantastic) model, whom I shall not name to avoid school gate ribbing.

Sommer 14 — A Dance of Death is currently playing at the Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court.

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Musicals, Posters, Publicity stills, Theatre

Singing songs about the Southland

There’s not much I can say about shooting the poster and advertising imagery for Dessa Rose, coming soon to Trafalgar Studios.

Stars Cynthia Erivo and Cassidy Janson worked every angle and every emotion like they’d been born for the camera.

Costume designer Pippa Batt delivered in spades on virtually no notice.

Associate director Jen Bakst not only kept us to the schedule like a Japanese train but managed to double as a rather good photographic assistant AND stop me falling over.

And executive producer Andrew Harmer got us from the studio to Richmond Park and back again as if chasing the sun via every traffic jam in London were his raison d’être.

All I had to do was turn up and click.

(PS I’ve included a behind the scenes shot courtesy of Mr Harmer that demonstrates perfectly why my career’s doomed the moment I need a hip replacement.)

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From the archives, Posters, Publicity stills, Theatre

Transfusion

Some interesting challenges posed by advertising Passing By, Martin Sherman’s play about two men who fall in love which makes a virtue out of treating them as normal human beings rather than theatrical excuses for oh-my-god-they’re-gay-this-is-an-ISSUE angst.

First off, advertising for gay plays tends to be anything but charming.  Traditionally, you stick as many topless buff young things as you can into the frame and make them strut.  This may have no relevance to the plot but, well, it works.

But if you sold Passing By that way, you’d be cheapening the very thing that makes it different.  That it’s not about guys shagging and being gay.  It’s a love story between two fully-rounded individuals who live actual, you know, lives and happen to be gay.

Second, we wanted the imagery to conjure up a retro 70s feeling to match the 70s setting.  But we absolutely didn’t want it to look like we’d just snapped a few shots on an iPhone and pumped it through a filter on instagram.

So the solution we came up with was to shoot outside and give as much of the retro feeling from the shooting technique itself as from jiggling it about in a computer, coupled with some spot-on costuming from Pippa Batt.

Then we came across a third problem.  On the transfer from the Finborough Theatre to the Tristan Bates Theatre, the original cast of Alex Felton and Steven Webb were no longer free.  Actors James Cartwright and Rik Makarem stepped in not, so much, to fill their shoes as to spin the play in an entirely different direction.

So we wanted the transfer advertising to reflect the vibe of the original, while making clear that it stood on its own two feet.  The stills also needed to meet the requirements of shooting for bigger print formats and online advertising.

And how do you do that?

In the first shoot, oranges and reds were the dominant tones and the abiding rule was to trick the lens into behaving like a piece of plastic.  For the transfer, everything was about the greens and shooting sharp as a razor. Different, but just enough of the same.

Assistant for lighting concept tests: Sara La Cuesta Calvo.

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Fashion, Portraits, Publicity stills

Even Lindsay Lohan got fired, you know.

What do you do when you’ve got a photoshoot that’s taken a month to organise and the model is so unprofessional she neither turns up nor tells you she’s not turning up?

Avail yourself of the kindness of your makeup artist and use her instead.

What do you do when you’ve got a photoshoot that’s taken a month to organise and the assistant (who’s never actually assisted on a photoshoot before and begged to do it, just so you know…) turns round the day before and demands more money than the rest of you combined are getting because “that’s what my friend got when he did a Gucci shoot”?

Avail yourself of the kindness of a friend who makes himself available at an evening’s notice.

What do you do when the model rings up six hours later and tells you she’s ready for you now?

Press “end call”.

So, the people who stopped all this falling apart:

Stylist: Claire Wacey

Makeup artist: Siwan Hill

Model-on-the-day: Siwan Hill

Assistant-on-the-day: Jaap Jong

 

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