Rice Dance Theatre’s “Dancing on the Edge” marketing poster

Every Spring, Rice University’s Dance Department puts on their big dance performance. Because Rice Dance Theatre is housed under the Rec Center, I am always assigned with the task of marketing the event. In the past, it’s been “Incite Insight” and “Backward with Conviction” and so on and so forth; in 2008, the theme was “Dancing on the Edge”.

I knew immediately that I wanted to put dancers on a cliff. Of course, we didn’t have the budget to fly people to a cliff and get them to pose and take a picture of them. So that’s where the Photoshop happens. I just wanted to show you the before picture and the after poster for the work.

First, I had to find the perfect cliff picture. After searching through a few free stock photography sites, I found a good picture from sxc.hu:

With that picture, I knew I could now go out and photograph the actual Dance girls, posing them where they were going to go on the picture. I printed out a copy and drew them on there with a pen before we headed out to the soccer field. I got up on a ladder (to simulate the angle) and shot away. Here are the original, unedited (albeit smaller) photos I used:

Great! Now all I had to do was extract them from those pictures and drop ‘em on to the cliff. When they were there, I needed to put them in the right spot, use the shadows in their original pictures to create new ones for them.

You’ll also see in the following before/after that we had to take the lighthouse out as well since it was WHITE and distracting from the eventual text and from the dancers.

Mouse over the image to see the before and after.

One of the problems of working with clients is that you don’t get the final say. The client does. In this case, what I wanted to do with the picture text-wise got tossed because what the Dance department wanted to do trumps what I thought would look best. We also had to “zoom” in on the picture because the dancers were a little small from that far out. So the final image is below, but I like to look at it without the text (see above picture) because I wouldn’t have gone with what they ended up with: