This week, I am doing a series on getting great visual to accompany your marketing and PR for your show.

On Monday, I talked about the importance of getting a really great publicity shot, and how to do that. Today, we discuss the topic of Production photos. But I can hear you now:  “photo shoots are expensive, time consuming, and pain to coordinate. Can’t I get away with just one?”

Nope, sorry, not gonna do it. Here’s why:

1. You need production photos for your archives. You never know when you might need archive photos: for your website, grant applications, etc.

2. If you were lucky enough to get preview coverage, you must have different photos to accompany your review. Newspapers generally don’t like to run the same photos that they ran for previews, and they like to run photos that are from the show, with the actual set, costumes, lights, props and actors.

Usually, these shoots take place during the final dress rehearsal, so the photographer can flit around and take the pictures without disturbing the audience. Alternatively, some people schedule it for the break between two-show days. The earlier the better–if you have dailies reviewing your show, you’ll need them pretty quickly, so that’s why most people go with the final dress rehearsal option.

Here’s one last tip for you (thanks to Simon for this one): most of the indie companies I work for don’t have the ability to upload their photos to a website for the press to download, which is what the big companies do. Flickr doesn’t work, because it won’t let you upload the size of photos you need to for publication. Photo Bucket is an excellent alternative. Allows you to store your high-res photos, all you have to do is email the URL to the press.

Here are some examples:

This is the publicity photo for Metamorphoses (image Pink Monkey Studios):

This was one of the production photos:

This was the publicity image for Exit Commander Kitty:

And here is a production photo:

Bone in Her Teeth by Leaky Heaven Circus has some of the best photos I have ever seen:

Publicity:

Production:

And my all time favorite:

Tune in Friday for information about B-roll.