When it was decided that the main character of our play would be Chris Petit despite his title as Marketing Director – an understandably large role in the production of our show. Because of this we decided that it would be best for Charlie and myself, alongside Chris, to form a marketing team in order to not overload Chris with work so early on in the process. We began to formulate strategies to market the play and after I drafted the initial budgets (both real-life and actual) we decided that we could use both posters and fliers in order to advertise the show. We also decided that we should maintain a strong social media presence as we intend to reference Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and Tumblr within our show.
We brainstormed ideas for poster and flier design and decided that the general design of the two items need to be similar, therefore making the decision to use the same photograph of the main character on both, but change the orientation of it between fliers and posters (Flier: Landscape, Poster: Portrait). The composition of the image consisted of the back of Chris Petit’s head, staring up at a blackboard/whiteboard. I felt that this image, whilst simple, is incredibly effective at connoting our intentions for the play. The use of a whiteboard/blackboard clearly symbolises the setting of our play and Chris’ positioning within the poster is also incredibly illustrative of his character going into the play. The fact that you can see his back suggests that he is moving forward with his life, also creating comradery with the potential audience member as they are both looking at the same thing: A blackboard/whiteboard with the title of the Play (Ungraded) at the top. Another interesting point to note about Chris’s positioning in this is that he is looking up at the board, suggesting that something to do with school is daunting for him.
Thanks to Iona Carter, a Media student at the University of Lincoln, the composition of these marketing materials was a simple process. Without her photography, the posters and fliers would be of a much lower quality than the final versions of the posters and fliers, shown below.
Flier
Poster
