Drifter Pictures goes to the Theater

For those of you who I haven't talked to about this yet, I'm creating a branch of our company that will focus on filming and editing theater performances. Given the 8 million plays and one-man shows that happen in LA every year, and given how actors always need material for their reels, I think there's a market for this service. I've watched several producers scramble at the last minute to try to find a friend who has a video camera, and I can only assume they end up with a DV tape they never deal with. With our service, they would end up with a nice finished DVD with titles and menus.

To that end I'm working on our initial advertising. I'm thinking the best/cheapest way to go is to distribute postcards to all the rental theaters and spaces, not to mention coffee shops, around town and see if we get any bites. Bryan and I agree that the postcard should be extremely simple, so simple that it will stand out in a crowd of photographs and graphics. Here are the two options I've come up with. I would LOVE any and all input as I'm looking to send these out to be printed at the end of this week.


This is the basic idea which we believe to be eye-catching because of the solid color with small text. The idea being that you would have to pick up the card to read the text. I know the quality isn't so great here so what the card says is "A performance lasts a night. Film lasts forever. Make your performance last." On the back will be information about our service and our website to go to for pricing info. Here's the 2nd version:


This, clearly, has a little more going on. Now leaves don't really have much to do with theater, but I feel like they give the sense of time passing, or the ephemeral nature of theater or some other pretentious ideas. At any rate, they make the card more interesting, in my opinion, but maybe they also make it easier to pass over.

So please, I would love any and all input on these graphics or any other ideas you might have. I'm trying to avoid doing something cheesy like a video camera pointed at the theater happy/sad masks (I know that has a name, I'm just blanking at the moment)

You can post comments here or email me directly if you'd prefer ashley@drifterpictures.com