Backstage with our poster designer

A perspective we might not think about very often in relationship to theatre production: the poster designer.  How does the story of the play make it into images weeks before the production goes up and the staging and design process is complete?  Here's an inside perspective on our process with Electra's student poster designer Colum Wedel. 

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My name’s Colum Wedel and it’s a real privilege to have been involved in Electra. I’m a final year Arts student in NUI Galway, and I designed the poster. I say “designed”, but it could never have existed without the creative input from the cast, production team and in particular the lovely director Charlotte.

My experience with graphic design is primarily posters – starting off with NUI Galway’s Literary and Debating Society and then with DramSoc. Dotted in-between, I designed NUIG’s 2013/14 College Annual and did a little work with Nyx Theatre and ThereisBear!, two Galway-based theatre companies. I’m certainly no professional and it’s a hobby I’ve enjoyed for the best part of two years, so it was very exciting to be contacted by an elusive figure like a lecturer in the Drama department!

To be honest, I’d be lying if I said this wasn't the most challenging poster I've worked on so far. About ten or fifteen half-designs were binned before the design you see in front of you arrived. Certainly, the worse ideas come before the better ones, but abandoning ship did cross my mind a couple of times!

Preliminary Design

Final Design

Electra is a very emotional and archetypal story, and this production has an extremely unique visual aesthetic, so we decided that an abstract representation would fit it best. Grief and pain feature heavily, and the characters are weighed down by their environment in a struggle between the natural and artificial worlds. It’s a kind of structured, escalating, swirling chaos. In our first meeting, Charlotte summed up Electra as the female version of Hamlet (i.e. the purest revenge story) – but since it was written two millennia ago, we could claim the inverse: that Hamlet is just the male version of Electra.

There was a bit of indecisive to-and-fro early on, but once we arrived at the image of the cracked urn/vase grasped by disembodied hands, we all knew we were on to something. I played around with stock photos, but a photorealistic image was a bit unfeasible, and too literal. The illustration that was created and used in the end (as well as the overall design) owes a lot of credit to Saul Bass who, as far as I’m concerned, is responsible for some of the best movie posters and opening sequences ever. I might also mention that the ideas and opinions of a couple of friends of mine really helped in the later stages of the design process.

My part is finished now, so all that’s left for me to do is sit back and anticipate what can only be a fantastic show. Good luck guys!