Fast on the heels of their success with Spent and the Toronto Star’s proclamation of Ravi Jain as a Person To Watch in 2010, Why Not Theatre is hard at work crafting I’m So Close, which will be shown as part of both The Theatre Centre’s Free Fall, as well as Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage.

Ravi hired me to make the marketing and promo materials for the show and after a few meetings discussing space, orbits, technology, love, loss and a whole bunch of other things, along with sharing references and YouTube videos, I went into my lab and came up with a bunch of ideas for our photoshoot.

The shoot was a lot of fun, we did a lot of experimentation and ended up with a lot of great shots to work with. I rented the beautiful 24-70mm f/2.8 lens for my D200, which was so versatile and sharp, I didn’t need anything else.

I really wanted to get my good friend and amazing illustrator Chris Simonen involved in the process. We discussed a bunch of ideas, including tracing photos, using watercolours, and particularly agreeing that hand-drawn fonts were something we wanted to experiment with.

Chris came up with a handful of beautiful font samples for the title and the body text and after deciding on one, I sent him off with some of the photos and a brief synopsis of the play as I knew it to get creative and make some illustrations for the main poster.

In the meantime, I came up with the idea of making several teaser posters after looking through some of the cool shots we got. Aside from creating more work for myself, I only had a rough idea of how I wanted them to look. The only thing I knew I was going to start with was the watercolour/space backgrounds. From there, on a rainy Saturday in California, riding in the back of a car on the way up to Napa Valley, I started to experiment, and by the time we got to Bouchon Bakery I had more or less designed the postcard. I was really excited about the direction the design took and knew right then that I was going to use it throughout the promo materials. From there it was just a matter of refining the technique, getting all the copy straight with Ravi and the various producers, and formatting them for print.

Apparently Harbourfront Centre and Theatre Centre were both so excited about the design that they’re using the postcard as promo for their respective festivals as well, so you could be seeing these designs all over the place in the coming month.

The show opens on March 23, 2010 at The Theatre Centre. Check the postcard and the various websites mentioned above for more details. I’ll be in attendance and hopefully I’ll see you there.