06/12/2024
Thanks to everyone who reached out about my free design offer yesterday. I'm looking forward to our collaborations.
I wanted to share another piece I designed and tell the story behind it.
The below image was made for the digital comedy series HEADSHOTS, which I created with Shane Murphy, Colin Fleming, Eric Schiller, Christopher Spaleta and many other great collaborators.
In episode 7, we took a good-natured poke at contemporary dance. John Marcucci, the hilarious leading actor seen below, played the apotheosis of the pretentious artist who didn't know what he wanted. I wrote the first draft of the script and then took it into the writers' room with Shane, Colin, Eric and Chris. Behind the heightened goofiness of the episode, there was a genuine dilemma of how to get a client to explain what they want. We'd all experienced that before. I can't remember the ending of the first draft, but I think having the photographer using the dancer's pretentious language to connect with him was already in place. Still, something was missing. I think Colin suggested that once the dancer felt seen and understood, he had the epiphany "Hard key light from above, wide oblique angle, bloody diaper." Everyone in the writers' room cracked up.
There were many brainstorms about the final image as well. You may need to watch the episode for context, but one wild picture idea was to have a pool of blood on top of a drum and then have our dancer bash the blood into the air with two d***o drumsticks. If only we had the budget.
For our final image, Eric created some great textured lighting, John brought incredible passion to his poses and Kat Milligan (our make-up and SFX artist) placed that blood with great professionalism. I just had to press that shutter button.
I brought the image into photoshop and wanted to do very little to it at first. The idea of a broadway playbill at the Monsanto theatre was a last minute decision ironically suggested by the dialogue (easter eggs for the most attentive audience members). It was a bit of a hunt to match the official Playbill fonts (parodied as Showbill) and to find a weird font for the title "Phallus Wound". The halo of light around his head was also a photoshop addition which almost happened by accident during a small touch-up.
I've never been so proud of a silly image.
