Behind the Scenes of an ImproMafia photoshoot

New year, new looks!

You don’t have to be an expert in marketing to know that good photos do wonders to grab your attention. We’ve lived by that philosophy for more than a decade at ImproMafia - we love getting our performers’ mugs captured in pixels!

Our good fortune in theatrical imagery comes down to the quiet genius of one man: Kris Anderson of Images By Anderson.

Kris is an incredibly modest and humble Canadian, so he would be unlikely to call himself that. Or if he did, he’d apologise immediately.

But it’s a fact Kris’ evolution from an improvising musician into pro photographer has helped ImproMafia become known for its truly inventive show photography.

That’s right, Kris is a man of many talents! It was during our initial forays into long form at the Brisbane Arts Theatre around 2008-2009 that Kris started bringing in a DSLR camera and practising his new hobby of photography alongside accompanying shows on the piano.

Within a year or two, the camera had been upgraded, and Kris had added light boxes, flashes and other tools of the trade to his kit. He began doing photo-a-day challenges and upping his image retouching game. He used to tell us he loved photographing performers because we would strike many poses, and give him lots of good faces, particularly when we were performing in full costume on sets.

In turn, we loved these beautiful images that would give us a concrete memory of shows that by their nature were so ephemeral.

A Kris Anderson shot from the 2011 production of murder mystery comedy “Agatha Holmes Ahoy!”

Kris and his equally talented wife Wanda eventually founded Images by Anderson, started winning photography awards, and all sorts of plaudits deservedly came their way.

So we’re still chuffed that Kris likes us enough to keep working with us on our photography concepts.

On Sunday 6 February we held an epic, nine-hour photoshoot at Spine Street Studios at Sumner to capture a whole suite of images for ImproMafia’s 2022 performance year.

As you can imagine, this involved a lot of preparation!

It started back in 2021, when the ImproMafia committee called for show submissions from the wider company. This allows regular performers to pitch ideas for shows they’re passionate about developing. Luke Rimmelzwaan then led the curation process as we worked out what ideas were achievable and would suit the various performance opportunities the company would have in 2022.

Carla Haynes poses for a music-inspired pic with Kris.

Once selected, planning for the photoshoot began with Luke generating some general ideas for what are called “hero images” - those key pictures that represent productions. Kris and I joined in the brainstorming to discuss logistical and technical photography elements, plus costume/styling needs.

Luke then worked with performers and the show creators to schedule a timetable, ensuring that we had different performers in each shot to showcase our diverse range of gorgeous performers. I spent days sourcing costumes, props and other necessities (including lollies and water!) for the shoot.

All this prep meant the day itself working as fairly close to clockwork as you can get. Kris and his daughter/assistant Tara arrived at the studio at 8am, and I followed at 8.30am to be in the first photoshoot.

It didn’t stop from there! We had hero shot set ups for 12 shows, plus headshots for 21 people who attended through the day. The headshots are really useful for us to have should we need to quickly grab promo material for sudden opportunities.

We also added to our collection of “pineapple” shots, which are those you can see here on the website. We adopted the pineapple in our rebrand of 2020 (fun fact: we did the photoshoot with Kris for that rebrand one week before Brisbane went into the first pandemic lockdown!), and we like to add to our reservoir of pineapple pics whenever we hit the studio with Kris.

We wrapped up shooting at 5pm, then got everything packed up and the studio tidied by 5.30pm. A huge day, but super satisfying. Kris told me our stats for the day were:

2200 shots
2 camera battery changes
4 strobes
8 strobe battery changes
9 lighting modifiers
1 smoke machine

The next part is going through all of the proofs to narrow down our selection of all of the wonderful photos. No doubt we’ll do an update and share some gorgeous images with you.

Adam poses for one of our “pineapple” shots with Kris.

Thanks again to the wonderful performers who gave their time to be in photos, and of course to Kris and Images by Anderson for all the hard work!

Written by Natalie Bochenski