Pomona

I have always loved a good cinematic trailer, particularly for theatre productions. I first tackled one such trailer when working on The Macbeths back in my sixth form, but it was a style that I had long since wanted to have another go at. Pomona, the week 4 weekend show for DramaSoc's Autumn 2022 line-up, presented just the sort of opportunity I was looking for: it was dark, gritty, and very weird.

The trailer was constructed and finalised over the space of around 10 days, although the majority of this time was spent planning the shots and atmosphere out in my head. I also spent this early development time selecting a suitable audio track and editing it down to be roughly a minute in length. However, it wasn't until I was able to finally see the show performed in the space during production week that it all began to click into place.

Ultimately, the trailer had to be filmed twice over, on two consecutive nights, as the footage captured on the first night was totally unusable due to my own camera not being able to handle the dim lighting conditions presented by a night shoot. Returning the next evening, having borrowed my equipment from a friend of mine, just as I had done for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, enabled me to capture the trailer in full. The final footage took around 4 hours to cut down, edit into the timeline, and colour grade appropriately to match the more greenish tinge of the show's various social media posts.

For my combined work on both The Hard Boiled Egg and Pomona, I received the award for 'Best Innovator' at the DramaSoc Autumn 2022 awards!