Young Dragon: A Bruce Lee Story
My favorite shows to work on at SCT are always new works. This year our big new work was “Young Dragon: A Bruce Lee Story” by Keiko Green. What is so fun about new works is frequently you don’t have that much to go off of in the initial art. For Young Dragon I knew the base line, but what really expanded my understanding and led to the photography creative below was the craftsmanship and storytelling that I got to witness from the creative team.
The Young Dragon campaign started as a simple illustration creative-only campaign with a few digital ads to a fully fledged physical marketing campaign, with billboards, bus ads, photoshoots and merchandise collabs.
Young Dragon Photoshoot
The Bruce Lee photoshoot was out best organized and best outcome photoshoot I got to plan at SCT. Each photoshoot has to be carefully planned with production so that union rules are followed and time is managed effectively, so this photoshoot had to flow extremely smoothly because we only had an hour.
Every photoshoot comes with new challenges. This particular shoot was a challenge because, not only was it very physical, so we needed to take breaks in between each of the moves, but it was also showing classic Bruce Lee poses, so if anything was off, it could make the photos look clunky.
I brought a moodboad with all the different poses we wanted to hit, but with room to play around, we played music and shot social content and managed to get through everything we needed.
We wanted this shoot to look “cool”. It was our first show appealing to older audiences and it is about the icon Bruce Lee. I knew how I wanted it to look in editing, so the photoshoot was all about getting the clearest path to all the poster photos, which we did using bright lighting and an all white background.
PHOTOS BY GIAO NGUYEN
Bruce Lee is the fire, the world is the water.
Editing/designing the photos for the Bruce Lee photoshoot was so much fun. I had the color pallete from the illustration already, but I knew I wanted to elevate the direction and connect it directly to the themes the director Jess McLeod described. “Bruce Lee is the fire, the world is the water” are the visuals that were described to our team as well as the production team, and I wanted that to show through in the design. To get this effect I added water textures to the background and kept the world very blue, while keeping the title orange and adding a motion blur glow behind Bruce, producing a “fire” like effect.
Stevie Shao x Young Dragon
Something I knew I wanted to accomplish during my time at SCT was working with local artists for different shows. This is tricky, because it often takes budget that non-profits don’t have, but I knew with Young Dragon we wanted to promote the show as much as possible, and what better way is there to support a show about a Bruce Lee and his time as an artist in Seattle, than to hire an amazing Seattle Artist to make merch for the show.
Stevie Shao is an incredible artist in the PNW, I had been trying to figure out how to work with her, because her style is incredibly colorful and fun and perfect for children’s theatre, and one day I saw that she posted a Bruce Lee quote and it felt like the perfect fit.
Working with Stevie we made posters, stickers, hats, and totes. Everyone was so happy with how they turned out and we even had people come see the show specifically because they heard about the collab.
