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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.

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.

 

Kris Anderson IFSWPP M.PhotogI M.WPPI MNZIPP(Dist.) is a Certified Professional Photographer with the Professional Photographers Association of Queensland, an NZIPP Australian Accredited Professional Photographer, and proud EIZO Ambassador. He has been recognised as a Fellow of the Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers , an NZIPP Master with Distinction, and Icon International Photography Awards Double Master .

 

Kris’ work has received gold awards at international, national and state levels for professional print judging. He was recently recognised as the 2023 NZIPP Australian Portrait Photographer of the Year and the 2023 SWPP Portrait Photographer of the Year. Prior to that, Kris was awarded 2019 AIPP Queensland Professional Photographer of the Year. He has also won state and national titles for AIPP Professional Illustrative Photographer of the Year.

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