Welcome to the Grand Guignol
Promoting a Halloween anthology
The Client
The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre of Waukesha
The Project
Horror, but family-friendly
To tie in with Halloween, the director of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre had compiled an anthology of short, spooky plays in the tradition of guignol theatre (a genre of French theatre that blends horror and comedy). The plays were often more suggestively terrifying than anything outright gory, to appeal to the wider community.
Deliverables:
Show logo, poster, and social media assets
Influences
Embracing less is more
The plays were still being finalized at the time of promotions, so the anthology title and some general themes of horror were about what we had to start with. In keeping with the suggestive less-is-more approach of the plays, we embraced a minimalist aesthetic, with strong influences from Saul Bass's poster work.
The poster work of Saul Bass. Bold colors, fragmented silhouettes, dynamic compositions
The Finished Poster
A stained glass tableau of terror
The process was not unlike collage, with each element created in isolation before being brought together into a whole.
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Different arrangements were experimented with to find a configuration that had consistent points of interest to move the viewer's eye. Color was applied at the very end to ensure that the silhouetted shapes could work on their own.
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The poster's modular design also proved helpful for the varying size requirements of social media – the elements could be rearranged depending on the needs of the platform in question.