With the Alice show, I hit a number of milestones. One of those was using Midjourney for image creation. This allowed a /number of advantages over Bing Create, primarily the ability to set a different aspect ratio and to iterate on images, tuning them in a specific direction. A second milestone was doing posters for concessions and standing-o grams.
To provide context on the show posters, I was working on retrofitting an mobile bar/countertop to be the Vanitea bar. My original concept was to have a number of playing cards (large format) on the front of it – with characters from Alice. (Next context bit – Alice in Wonderland is somewhat based on playing cards, whereas it’s companion volume, “Through the Looking Glass” is based on chess.) So, I went full speed ahead with it, creating the Queen of Hearts and White Rabbit posters. The following week, we were provided additional direction from the directors that took the bar concept in a whole different direction, no playing card posters needed.
With a couple of the posters already printed, I approached the front of house manager, and she was happy to use the posters for the lobby. Around this time, I was helping one of our daughters in her move to Oregon, and during the long drive, I spent quite a bit of time on Midjourney attempting to create images for Alice posters.
Somewhere along the way, as part of the playing card style, I created new suits that would match the card in question. Here, rather than the traditional hearts, diamonds, spades or clubs, the white rabbit got a pocket watch.
The Mad Hatter was possibly the most interesting poster of the set. At this point, I was also playing with a “face swapping” utility that took a defined face and swapped it with the face in the picture. This picture has a pretty close resemblance to the actor who was playing the Mad Hatter.
I tried face swapping with the Cheshire Cat as well, but the effects were just super weird, so that didn’t go anywhere. It also seems impossible to create cat paws with the correct number of toes.
Although Brock was in the musical, I hadn’t really looked at the script to see what it was about. It turns out that the show wasn’t really about “Alice in Wonderland” at all, other than borrowing some of the characters and using them in totally different roles. By that point it was show week, and it was too late to do anything different (even if I had known what to do).
When I got the request to create posters for Standing-O grams and Concessions, I was able to use a lot of the assets that I had created on my long road trip. This poster was an amalgamation of five different images (including the background), merged together using Affinity Photo (a photoshop type app). I was pretty happy with the Jabberwock and his chewed up sign.
The Concessions poster used a lot of different images (including some heralds with strange looking “trumpets”).
