Upfront Theatre

Upfront Theatre

matty_3.6.10_ 284

A few weeks back I shot a group of the Upfront Theatre improv comedians for some advertising material. It was a lot of fun. Set up your lights, pull out the camera, and these guys just start doing there thing. You don’t have to say a thing, they just kinda know it’s time to take pictures and they jump right into a skit as if there were an audience in front of them.

They are all very sharp comedians, and they keep there form by all regularly performing each week, as well as put on improv workshops for the community. They didn’t hold back, even for the simple photo shoot. The facial expressions were awesome and it made my job easy. I just to make sure my lighting was good and my exposure was dialed in.

We setup 4-5 different sketch themes that they do in some of their shows and shot away.

We shot all these right in the theatre, just cleared out some chairs. I setup the lights so that there was a nice gradient light fall-off to black. Even though the stage is directly in the background, you would never know it from these photos. There is one photo above, with the writers setup that I allowed some of the stage lighting to bleed into the photo, which provided a nice feel and gave some depth to the photo that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

It was really nice to see that the Upfront has already use a lot of the photo work for marketing, in fact, one of the photos as already graced the cover of a magazine! I’ve seen some posters floating around too using photo work.

Like I said… point the camera and shoot, the improv artists took care of the rest. I was laughing the whole time we shot this. Below are two my favorite pictures, from a funny point of view. DK’s impression of a cowboy is priceless. And then you have the mock family portrait. Kids fighting, mom trying to laugh off the situation, and dad just not givin’ a rats ass.

I’m looking forward to our next shoot together coming up later this month, so stay tuned for more funny photos from this group!