My Dalek life: Character posters now available

For those who were lucky enough to be able to come along to the play, you would have seen some lovely character posters (about A2 size) outside the theatre and others by the entrance to the Dress Circle.

Along with the poster for the play, beautiful as it is I was not involved with this, I thought it would be great to have twelve posters (one for each of the principal cast) showcasing the characters along with a quote of theirs. I quickly knocked up some very rough examples and ran them past Nick Scovell and Rob Thrush. Both of them thought this a great idea and said they would love this. Both Nick and myself did agree though that it would be best to not have one for the Supreme Dalek as this was the big surprise for Act Two.

It was then that I realised that I had about three weeks to produce 11 posters! The main design was simple and was the same across all the posters for consistency. What would take the time was getting photos of each memebr of the cast, and the Daleks, that I could then play with to create the posters.

I am very grateful to Jon Andrews who kindly took all the photos and gave me such great images to start with. In the tradition of Doctor Who, I used CSO! Each person was photographed against a green background so I could key out this colour to make it easier to drop them into the poster template. Although this gave me a problem with the Daleks as the green reflected on their domes. After speaking to Anthony Dry (who did the design for our cast and crew t-shirts) he said that it's best to do Daleks against white. At least I know for another day!

All the photos were taken during the breaks at rehearsals and then Jon would give me a copy of the images the next time. Each week I was doing about three posters and then having to get the final sign-off from Nick, while still learning my lines!

There is a logical flow as well to the posters with regards to the colours that I used. Starting with the Doctor all the heroes use shades of blue and green, while the villains cross to yellows, oranges and reds ending up with the Dalek Commander.

Eventually, with about a week to spare, I finished the last couple and passed them to Rob as he was going to get a set printed. When they were and I saw them up in the theatre, I thought they were fantastic.

Now you've got the chance to get your hands on your own copies! Each image was originally created at an A4 size of 300dpi in CMYK ready for printing, although these are low-res versions under 1Mb each as the originals are each about 8Mb.

Heroes