Another great event took place at Revival on December 11, as Les Coquettes presented their annual holiday spectacular, titled Gala. The performance was based around old Hollywood glamour, with tributes to Singing In The Rain and the silent film era among others.
Their next event is a New Year’s Eve performance at the Sanderson Theatre in Brantford, Ontario. That should shake up that sleepy town a little bit.
Les Coquettes are at it again, with their annual Halloween spectacular — Cabaret Enchanté, happening at Revival on October 23 and 30. Buy your tickets here, or check out the Facebook event here.
Revival was kind enough to loan us their space so we could shoot the ad you see above.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes lighting setup:
Key light was the AB400 in a 24×36 softbox up high on the stand on the right side. Fill flash was the Alien Bees ABR800 Ringflash in front. An AB1600 is that bright spot in the middle of the frame, placed behind the subjects for a wee bit of rim lighting.
Models: Billie Black, Dante Inferno, and Lilli Bubalotovich.
Hair and Makeup: Angela McQueen
Styling, Wardrobe, Art Direction: Catherine Skinner
Poster Design: Sonya
Last week I showed you the poster art for the next Les Coquettes production, The War On Christmas. Below is the continuation of that campaign, as our talented and anonymous designer went to great lengths to devise poster art for most of the characters in the troupe based on my photos. I think they turned out really great and I love seeing my photos come alive in different ways. If you’re planning on coming to the show, don’t hesitate to get your tickets, as the early show is already sold out!
Hair and makeup by Angela McQueen and Blonde Moxie, styling by Catherine Skinner.
Lilli Bubalotovich, La Minouche, The Barback, Georgie Gates, Billie Black, Charity Dawn, and Dante Inferno
I hate Christmas, so it’s only fitting that I’d be involved in this production. What you see above is the promotional poster for the next Les Coquettes show, taking place on December 12, 2010. It’s based around a 1940s USO theme, which should be fairly evident from the poster. All seven performers above were shot separately on a grey background, cut out, and then composited on to the poster. Have a look at what we started with:
That mailing tube made one heck of a good candy cane substitute. Tickets are on sale now — I expect to see all of you there!
I’ve been shooting with Les Coquettes for almost two years now, but speaking as a fan, our annual Halloween show is not to be missed. This year was no exception, and we extended the fun and nakedness across four performances on two nights. Enjoy some highlights from the show below, and if you like what you see, don’t forget to come out for the Christmas spectacular — The War On Christmas — on December 12th at Revival.
Our fans are the greatest and many of them arrived for the festivities in full costume:
As part of my ongoing work with Les Coquettes, I was recently assigned to shoot some images for Les Coquettes Academy. The Academy is burlesque university, essentially — a six-week course on performing, creating characters, and costume design. I shot four girls in forty minutes with three lights, which was a challenge. We were pressed for time, and the four students weren’t exactly professional models. Lilli Bubalotovich, their instructor, helped out tremendously by suggesting poses unique to their characters, while I quickly snapped away.
These and many others were all shot on white seamless paper, which gave me the flexibility to change the background colour in post production, since there wasn’t enough time during the shoot to switch up coloured gels. Zack Arias, photographer extraordinaire, has a great video tutorial on this technique.
The 2010 Les Coquettes season is underway with their February production of Love Story. I once again photographed the poster art/ad campaign.
Photo: Ryan Visima (moi); Layout and Design: Jake; Models: Georgie Gates (Dana Bondy), The Carpenter (Dave Lapsley); Makeup: Angela McQueen
The goal was a Harlequin romance novel level of cheesiness, and I think we hit it big time. Check out the lighting setup:
Dana and Dave are on a dark grey seamless backdrop. The main light was an Alien Bees 1600 in a 24×36 softbox. The rim light was a Nikon SB-900 at full power, with a warm orange gel, to simulate Dana and Dave being lit up by the romantic fire that rages behind them. The reflector in the bottom right corner actually wasn’t to reflect any light at all — we used it as an impromptu wind machine. La Minouche (Catherine Skinner) waved it furiously for the better part of half an hour! The image was also flipped on the horizontal axis in post, which is why the diagram doesn’t match up with the light sources in the photo.
Back to Les Coquettes… It’s an exciting season for a couple reasons. First up is a new venue, the Lower Ossington Theatre. The shot above was produced in one of the rehearsal facilities at the LOT.
I recently got a new camera (Nikon D300s), so my old Nikon D200 has been relegated to backup status. That makes it perfect for things like time lapse videos, so I made a little behind-the-scenes magic for your enjoyment. It stops just short of where we actually started shooting the poster content. The camera’s intervalometer was set to 4 second intervals and I took 1,486 shots between 8:00pm and 9:40pm. It’s being played back at 24fps.
The second exciting reason is a new venture in tiered ticket prices and fundraising. The layout of the venue provides some flexibility in terms of seating, so there’s three different price levels — proceeds from the upper price tier are going towards the Toronto Youth Theatre.
Best of all, Love Story is being presented twice in one night — each show being slightly different from the other. Want to see a bawdy night of burlesque and then have a romantic Valentine’s dinner after the show? Go for it — the first show is at 7pm. Prefer to eat first and be entertained later? That’s cool too, because the late show starts at 9:30.
This is awesome for me, the photographer, who usually can’t enjoy the full spectrum of the show when seeing it through my viewfinder. So I’ll get to watch one show and photograph the other.
The show is three weeks away, but tickets are already selling out. See you there!
The next Les Coquettes production is in full swing and coming to Revival on October 25th! Last week, we shot the poster image with three of the loveliest Coquettes: Billie Black, La Minouche, and Charity Dawn. And let’s not forget The Carpenter!
Photo: Ryan Visima (moi); Art Direction/Styling: Catherine Skinner, James Smith, Sarah Jamal; Makeup: Angela McQueen; Layout and Design: James Smith
Buy tickets online here or click the image above. And for more Les Coquettes goodness, check out:
Lighting for this was pretty simple… sticking to my one-light-is-more-than-enough ethic, I only used an Alien Bees 400 strobe with a 40° grid. The camera’s white balance was set intentionally cool for the pale vampire effect.
My favourite gal-pals (and a few boy-pals) from Les Coquettes did a little three-day run of a show titled The Long, Hot, Summer.
Illustration by James Smith, based on photos by moi. L-R: Charity Dawn, Dante Inferno.
Bread & Circus was the venue — a tiny little 80-seat venue in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. It’s much smaller than we were all used to — “backstage” was more of a hallway than anything else, the spotlights were dim, and shooting in such a cramped environment was challenging to say the least.
The upshot was that I had three days to get it right, so I was able to plant myself in a different spot every night to get a variety of shots from all angles.
See the whole set on Flickr!
My pals from Les Coquettes are at it again, presenting a revised and updated version of The Beautiful and The Damned this Sunday. Lo and behold, Toronto Life magazine thought the event was worthy enough to grace the front page of their website… and they featured my photo! Check out The Weekender article as well with my photo credit. Here’s a screencap of the front page in case it’s gone by the time you get there:
Photo: vtography, Models: Georgie Gates and Dew Lily, Makeup: Larissa Palaszczuk, Wardrobe Styling: Matthew Stokes, Art Direction: Catherine Skinner.