Big Girls Club Poster

I am writing this as to show the process of the popular Big Girls Club poster. Big Girls Club is a play written and directed by Leah Winkler, whom I founded Everywhere Theatre Group with. I also produced video installations for the play. From conception to completion poster production was a fairly quick process, I had a clear idea of what I wanted for the poster and was on a very tight time schedule. Promotional material deadlines were looming, as well as a video production schedule, leaving me with three days to complete all promotional material for the play.

Concept:

I remember waking up one morning with the idea, which is either funny or disturbing, I can’t decide. Leah had spoken with me about the particular mood that she had wanted to poster to reflect. She wanted the the girls to have a sense of Over-joy to them, “very very happy” is I think how she described it, while mixing in the themes of binge eating and junk food. My original plan revolved around a “Candyland” theme, with the girls in a junk food world wearing expressions of extreme happiness. A more subdued version of this became the secondary poster. Then all of the sudden I got the idea for poster as it is. The girl in the scene would be so overly-happy that her head just popped off to reveal rainbows and candy. This plays on the themes of junk-food and extreme happiness but also brings in other themes from the piece, since the play eloquently shows the girls mentally and physically ripping each other apart with words. I felt that a very graphic and un-apologetic look was needed. This led to so criticism but I will get to that later.

Photo Shoot:

The original image was a quick shot I took of Lisa Bierman, one of the lead actresses in the piece (I had not told the actresses what we were planning on doing with the images, other than that they would be heavily photoshoped):

From this image I was able to make the rest of the poster. I started with the decapitation since that is the element that would be the hardest to get right. I felt like I wanted an even bigger smile so I would extend and warp the mouth and teeth. I had to do some intensive image gathering to and use bits an pieces of what I could find here and there to create a realistic head stump. As well as work on overall color correction and mattes. After a couple hours of work I came up with the first prototype:

After this version was approved I moved on to figuring out what I wanted to do next. First was work work work on the blood. Second was to move on to the rest of the image, what was coming out of the neck. Well I knew I wanted double rainbows and a fountain of candy, hard and colorful. It came to my attention that all of this needed to come from somewhere, the solid neck of the stump wasn’t working for me. So I added in PVC pipe, as if the head were simply screwed on, or like the neck of a doll I then used a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop to create the colorful candy and rainbows:

I also added in lots of colorful hard candy, I used Illustrator to vary color, direction, and size of the candy. This was to make it look as if a fountain of candy was erupting from the neck. Next was fixing the font and text I had created for the piece to a more standard font. I felt that the drawn letters were adding too much of a childlike vibe to the piece that was distracting from the overall mood. Accept for title tweaks and some final touches this was what would become the final version of the poster. I had little time to do more than a couple drafts.

After sending out the final version of the poster, some people involved with the company were concerned that it may be too graphic. In order to deal with this the secondary poster was created, which featured all three girls standing on candy. There were also three different “censored” versions of the poster created that were never used or released. They are below:

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