I recently worked on the illustration and poster for the theatrical play Firnis (currently playing at the Rationaltheater in Munich). Among the various concepts we came up with, was to shoot a photo and then partially burn it.
The play’s synopsis gives you some idea about the storyline and why we chose this kind of process:
A boy and a girl:
rationaltheater.de [translation is mine]
1 and 0.
He wants the revolution,
she claims to have escaped from a film.
It’s an old film, that needs to be restored,
she doesn’t want to be digitized,
says the girl.
She doesn’t want to play the role of her life in this film anymore, she says.
She wants to die.
Of course, the boy doesn’t believe her story,
and yet they set out to find the last reel existing,
to destroy it.
The process of burning an actual analogue photo was really interesting: it is very unpredictable, but also controllable to a certain degree.
To create something and then destroy it in a controlled manner is something I have been doing a lot in music, so it was great to try it with images as well.
These burned photos are being used as extra material for the online promotion, for the actual poster I went in a slightly different direction. While this is an illustration and not a photo, the overall style is pretty similar and I also used destructive techniques – albeit more digital ones – to create it.
I quite like how that one turned out as well and they works pretty well together.
