In May 2019, Chayka (The Seagull), an iconic play by Anton Chekhov, directed by Kirill Pirogov, premiered on the stage of the Pyotr Fomenko Workshop Theatre (Moscow). I and my team had the honor to work on a series of posters for the play.

Our creative task was to produce a poster that is different from what actually happens on stage, yet contains play’s general mood. The goal was to be graphic and poetic at the same time.

For the flocking seagulls' backdrop we used a real-life backward projection, cast onto the stripes of gauze (yes, all FX are in-camera)
To give the portraits their vintage look and old-movie-like feel, we used a tailor-made combination of an old-school 4×5 film camera with digital technologies
A digital camera shoots not the actual picture, but rather it’s projection on a grounding glass of a 4×5 field camera (in our case, it was Sinar F3). This way, the digital camera captures what the field camera is seeing.
The project was supported by Broncolor Russia.