The S Paradox Design
So, some cool news: I’ve signed on to be the graphic designer for Babes With Blades Theatre Company!
I’ve worked on a couple of design projects here and there for Babes, but we decided to make it official a few months ago. And now I can share the first full admat I designed for our upcoming production (which I also happen to be directing! My worlds are colliding!), The S Paradox by Jillian Leff. Here’s a little bit about the show:
In a distant future, the United States has undergone sweeping reform: guns are banned, healthcare is free and numerous tax and economic bills have helped lessen the division of classes and pulled millions out of poverty. Sloane is a young woman who has been tapped by a watchdog intelligence agency called the CRC, led by the odd, yet charming William Hale. As Sloane triumphantly, and a little drunkenly, leaves a warehouse after signing her contract, she is stopped by a mysterious woman who says she has come back in time to stop Sloane from making the biggest mistake of her life.
I always envisioned this story under an 80s, sci fi, time travel, buddy adventure lens, so when the marketing team and I started brainstorming what the poster design would look like I was pretty excited by their ideas.
We played with the idea of a Rubin’s Vase, a dissolve of one character from another and something signifying different timelines that our main characters would run across.
We had a photoshoot with my buddy Steve Townshend at Distant Era and captured a lot of really great shots of our actors, but at the end of the day we decided to go with a variation of the Rubin’s Vase layout. While working on the first draft it became clear that with all the other design elements, using face-to-face images resembled a wrestling event rather than a theatre poster (no diss to wrestling). I tinkered around and we agreed that a back-to-back layout worked best and I started finalizing everything. Here’s the final admat:
I rounded out the whole package with a motion graphic using After Effects.
We’re in rehearsals now and I gotta say, my cast is killing it. I can’t wait for folks to see this show. If you’re in Chicago between April 7th - May 18th, come check us out at The Factory Theater!
