Clue – Live Theater Photos, Cards, Box Cover, and Promo Design

Theatre Baton Rouge got in touch with me to see if I could do the photo shoot and promo shots for their live production of “Clue.” They basically wanted character cards made up, a box cover with the cast and crew, and some action shots.

Well, the Clue board game has been around for a long time and gone through many iterations. Sometimes the design is very minimal, sometimes they try to tie in other movie franchises, sometimes they use photos, sometimes they’ll use stylized art, etc.

I decided that I wanted to have the characters photographed making an expression that was key to their character’s personality, and then on the card design I’d have a character description like, “the adventurer” or “the starlet.” I also decided to do the photoshoot with each character against a red wall because I knew I would be able to change the color of the background to suit the color of the characters. For me it’s easier to do this on a colored background as opposed to white or black. Each character corresponds to a color, i.e. Plum, Mustard, White, Green, etc., so each character would match their background.

Cards

Each actor from the play came to the shoot wearing their costume so I was able to use their costume color to help change the color of the background to match. I eventually added cigarette smoke, pipe smoke, and things like that. I also wanted to give the cards a painterly look as well as add a texture to the cards that make the photograph look like it was on cardboard.

Three additional actor photos were sent to me after I was done shooting that were not shot by me: The Cook, Yvette, and Mr. Boddy. Even though I didn’t shoot these I was able to incorporate them into the theme of the cards.

Then they wanted a second, alternate set featuring the characters holding their weapons. I’m not sure if they ever used these or not but I went with a different approach so I could incorporate the full body image. I did a playing card thing where the characters’ names were at the bottom and top of each card.

To get that painterly effect I did a lot of dodging and burning to the costumes and hair to make each fold and highlight really stand out. I do a trick with just the hair so the hair looks painterly as well. For a uniform painterly feel I use a Nik plug-in which lets you dial in what kind of painterly texture you want. I was able to dial in a cardboard feel to it and followed that up by using Exposure X6 to give it more of a vintage look. Nik and Exposure are usually my finishing touches when it comes to stuff like this.

Box Cover

Then, of course, they wanted a promo photo of the cast and have it look like the box cover. I took a page from the Annie Leibovitz method and arrange the characters on stage to have a certain flow. Like, if you were to divide the frame up into lines of quarters and quadrants and dividing lines you’d want elbows, heads, and legs to be positioned and bent in such a way to give meaning to the entire image and create a path for the eye to follow.

Of course, these photos that Leibovitz shoots are composites and well thought out before hand. That being said, I did take into account how many actors there were, the stage props, and how I wanted the image to look before I got there.
So, I did position the actors and told them how I wanted their legs, arms, and body positions to be. Here is the image by itself.

And here is the image with the grid I had in mind and how I wanted elbows, knees, heads, arms, and positions to flow. The green lines and circles is just me illustrating the connecting lines between characters.

It’s not perfect but the gist of it is that the head of Mr. Green and Wadsworth are in opposite but aligned triangle groups. Col. Mustard was standing straight in the center (but a little off in this image…my fault). The arm of Mr. Green rests on the shoulder of Mrs. White and she is holding his hand which creates a straight line going down in the left third. Mrs. White’s knees line up with the knees of Scarlet and Plum. The arm and leg of Plum were supposed to line up with Peacock but now when I look at it I don’t like how her arm comes out of his head…my fault. But, anyway, you can see the idea here of visual flow, positioning, and why angles of elbows and knees are important to make this grid work.

I did the same type of thing for another shot but it was a bit trickier.

This one I actually had to composite everyone in. Since there were characters in the background and characters in the foreground I wanted to make sure everyone was in focus and everyone was evenly lit. I shot Mr. Green by himself, Peacock and Mustard together, and the final three together. I added fire to the fireplace, the glow on the bench, added a ceiling, fixed the wall, added wall texture, then added the logo. This was meant to be less of a box cover and more of an in-theater promo picture.

Well, they said the photos helped out with sales quite a bit, so I’m happy to hear that. I think they even printed out the cards and had people in the audience hold up the card for who they thought “did it” at the end of the play. Fun times.