What goes into art-directing a brochure cover?
Some of the most interesting and satisfying creative projects I have worked on recently were the brochures and programs at Artsworx, the Performing Arts Centre at the University of Southern Queensland. Interesting, because we had state of the art technology and highly skilled professionals in the media department who helped us create the visuals we needed. Satisfying, because we worked with the Uni students from the arts faculty who were our emerging musicians, actors and artists, so it was wonderful to see the potential in these young adults, through our commercial endeavours.
When you work with one of the states longest running drama and theatre programs in a tertiary setting, there’s bound to be a costume department worth delving into! The USQ costume room was a treasure trove. With costumes from Shakespeare classics to modern tragedies and everything in between, I was spoilt for choice with the creation of our look for the 2016- 2019 seasons “What’s on” guides.
The image above with the “Cultivate” cover was one of my favourite to produce. Featuring a second year music student who had a stunning classic look and was a natural in front of the camera it was hard to realise she had no formal training at all. Our costume dept delivered on the brief for “red, Spanish, sultry and tactile” and luckily the USQ radio and voice-over guru Jason Myatt loaned us his vintage “Elvis” microphone for the shoot. We were fortunate to book the brilliant USQ photographer David Martinelli who nailed the lighting brief and got the eye engagement with the lens spot on.
The second image above showing the Macbeth program cover, was also a fun project working with the theatre and costume departments. This time our “model” was a third year acting student from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The shoot for this program was multi-dimensional as we had to get multiple visuals out of the one studio booking. For this we needed full promotional collateral including posters, flyers, social media images, website images and the program itself, so the art direction of the shoot involved many different poses and lighting structures. It was a great outcome and so much fun to work on!
Sometimes we didn’t have access to “talent” as students were not available or it didn’t suit the creative brief. One such year was 2019 as we needed to produce the “What’s On” program during term break when all the students were on holidays. In this instance we reverted to stock imagery and chose two images that reflected what was actually in the program – a range of visual art and music. Ideally we would have had the art students illustrate these images however time did not permit this creative element and we went with purchasing images online.
Whilst working at USQ I was very fortunate to work with one of the country’s most talented and significant theatre directors, Matt Scholten (Artistic Director & Creative Producer of independent theatre company If Theatre in Brisbane). Matt was guest director for several 2016 and 2017 third-year student shows including “The House of Bernada Alba” and “Lysistrata” and it was a delight to collaborate with Matt on the programs and marketing material for these and other performances.
Working with young, eager to help uni students was pretty great, however there were also projects which required input from both mature age students and Uni lecturers and staff. McGregor Arts Retreat was one of our regular events where each year we presented 3-4 artistic retreats at USQ and each event required it’s own suite of marketing collateral. These retreats had been running for 50 years so I wasn’t about to mess with the branding – they had a long-standing loyal audience and the best way to showcase the product was also the simplest. We used real workshop participants in real-time actives doing their art for our brochures and collateral. In some instances we also enlisted teachers and USQ art lecturers (as seen above on the pottery wheel, David Usher) who were both passionate and authentic about what they do.
In so many of the student productions we were so fortunate to have the resources available to us, such as a TV production unit with green screen; a commercial sound studio for podcast production and radio broadcast; a team of highly skilled graphic, web and video designers and all the technical sound and lighting equipment of the Creative Arts and media departments. I am very grateful to USQ for the time I spent there – I do miss the Artsworx crew!