It's always a good feeling to be apart of something that receives critical praise. At the end of 2009 a good friend of mine began a theatre production company in Kansas City with his friend called Relevance Productions. Their first show was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which was well directed, performed, and received; but with little word of mouth about the show itself. Knowing the potential for something good when I see it, I offered what little skills I had and helped them to advertise their next set of productions for the 2010 season.
Carlos Murillo's Dark Play: Or Stories for Boys is a story about the dangers of anonymity on the Internet and those who would exploit it for sexual means or cruel amusement. The poster was alright but the pamphlet itself was fun to create.
My friend requested an image that combined the themes of technology, sexuality, and a hint of danger.
Finding an image of a woman curled next to a laptop on her bed created an intimacy that is implied in the context of the story with online chat rooms, but the shadowing of of her facial features also creates an aloofness and mystery to the character itself. An overlapping of a circuit board gave the appearance that the woman was not as true proponent of real life, once again tying to the stories theme of mixed identities and dangerous games on the Internet. The idea of the image as to create a appealing surreality about the whole affair, and I believe the image achieves that affect.
The addition of binary code to the background of the pamphlet created a texture as opposed to a plain white surface. The mixture of different font's was a way to draw the eye to different sections of the pamphlet. Monotony can prove to be very detrimental to the success of advertising an image; an important lesson from my typography professor.
My friends were very pleased, and the show once again was well received, if only to a small set of crowds. The next show proved to be much more intriguing to everybody involved, including me...
