As for so many people working in the arts, the last six months have been a very challenging time. Many of my clients are facing an existential crisis, which in turn has had a huge impact on my work. As a way to stay creative, focussed and productive while the situation plays out, I have embarked on a series of self-initiated projects in collaboration with photographer Helen Maybanks.
For both of us, these projects are an opportunity to explore ideas, experiment with new techniques, and produce work that we are proud of. Our hope is that while ‘real’ work is somewhat hard to come by, these projects will provide an opportunity to develop our skills and broaden our range, and that when the wider situation resolves itself, we are both professionally in a stronger position.
The first of these projects is a reimagining of La Bohème, the Puccini opera based on a novel about young bohemians living in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1840s. Our photography subjects were same sex dance partners Darren Whitby and Vishesh Mehta, who we thought of as contemporary versions of the central characters Mimi and Rodolpho. Helen worked with them in the studio on a series of portraits, and then moved to Soho to capture the couple dancing in a modern urban setting.
With the results from the shoot, I crafted a series of composite images and then turned these into posters for our reimagined production. There were several overlay effects I wanted to experiment with, which Helen and I discussed in advance of the shoot – her images were very much taken with this intended result in mind.
The first idea was to overlay one of the outdoor dance shots onto one or both of the portraits, as a way of creating a seamless image with more than one focal point. I was interested in two things: firstly, how the images would interact where they merge, and the shapes/forms that would be created by doing this. Secondly, I was keen to play around with the difference in scale between the studio portraits and the outdoor ‘action’ shots – this is something you see a lot in movie posters, and that aesthetic was very much in my mind when creating this image.
The second idea was to take two of the portraits and again look at how overlay techniques could combine them into a single image. In my experience, designs featuring two people can be tricky to pull off, as positioning two heads on a page can create awkward spaces. I also wanted to create a sense of the characters looking into one another, sharing emotions if only fleetingly (the story has a tragic end after all!). The vivid colour overlays were a way to make the images stark and striking, and also a way to suggest the individuality of the two characters, even as they overlap and intersect.
Helen had taken a range of portraits with our subjects’ heads at different angles, and I tried several different combinations of these. The two you see here are my favourites.
The typeface used for the title and credits on all the designs is Helvetica Now, a major update to Helvetica by Monotype from 2019. The family has an extensive set of weights which I had fun experimenting with – eventually settling on the ‘hairline’ and ‘black’ weights for the titles.
This project was great for testing out some new ideas and techniques, and I’m really happy with the final designs. Our intention is to do more of these in the near future, so watch this space!