Photos of an Alaskan landscape, a window pane and an early sunrise combine to make exquisite “Magi’ poster
 |
| Cameron J. Metrejean |
Cameron j. Metrejean, a
student attending Northwestern Louisiana University
in Natchitoches
His enthusiasm quickly gave
way to panic.
“Shortly after the
excitement wore off I got nervous,” he said. “I suddenly had something to live
up to and I had no idea what I was going to do for this poster.”
Slidell Little Theatre routinely
relies on the kindness of individuals willing to freely volunteer their talents
and earlier in 2013 Cameron had responded to the theatre’s call for poster
artists and submitted an application with sample works.
This was not Cameron’s first
show poster; he had designed posters and playbills for such shows as The
Importance of Being Earnest, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Someone
Who’ll Watch Over Me.
But that didn’t calm his
nerves when it came to coming up with a design idea for SLT’s production of The
Gifts of the Magi.
“I quickly looked up the
show and found that I had heard of this story before and a few minutes later I
had an idea. That’s what half an hour of nervousness does to me,” he said.
Cameron has “dabbled in
photography” for several years, but it wasn’t until he attended college that he
started apply his photography to show posters.
“I got that the image would
be of a wrapped gift with light shining down on it,” he said, explaining his
initial conceptual process. “I wanted the poster to have a sense of being timeless, so it could work for any generation. That is why nothing you see in
the picture is out of place or anachronistic aside from the red bow which purposefully
stands out brighter in contrast to the rest of the picture.”
The final poster image is an
amalgamation of three photos: The frosted window frame, the snowy landscape,
and the table with the wrapped gift.
“The landscape picture was one
I had taken myself a couple years back while in Anchorage , Alaska
The table shot proved to take
a little more effort though.
“Though I’m much more savvy
with Photoshop than the average person I knew I wouldn’t be able to throw too
many separate elements together convincingly,” he said. “I needed natural
morning light for the picture, and luckily there was a table in my dorm
room right in front of a window on the side where the sun rose.”
But there was a tiny detail he
still had to overcome – the table belonged to his roommate and Cameron needed
to use it right where it was in order to capture the sunrise light. And to
state the obvious, Cameron would be creating quite a bit of a commotion early
in the morning to catch the sunlight.
Fortunately, his roommate
had made plans to spend the night elsewhere and granted Cameron permission to
clear the table off for his photo shoot as long as Cameron promised to “put everything
back the way it was.”
“The night before the
picture I cleared off his table, dusted it off, spread one of my white bed
sheets over it to serve as the likeness of a fine tablecloth, and placed the
items on the table,” he explained. “The gift package was some pieces of
cardboard that I had wrapped in a brown paper bag wrapped in a piece of elastic
(not twine as it is able to emulate from a distance). Perhaps it was the
college student in me but I had learned to be resourceful with some things.
“But the center piece
package wasn’t the only gift in the picture. I couldn’t help myself and decided
to throw in a little nuance to picture referencing the show. If you look
closely you’ll see a hair accessory on the corner of the top book on the left
side and a gold watch chain hanging out of the wooden box on the right side.”
The next morning’s shoot
went as he had planned, resulting in nearly 20 photos of the tableau in varying
degrees of sunlight.
Cameron eventually combined
the photos of Alaska
“It's a poster that I hope piques
people's interest and prepares them for an engaging show,” he said.
Cameron is currently
majoring in Performance and Directing Theatre at Northwestern State
University
