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Sample a quiet patch of the real background before extending the canvas.
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Desk notes: hanging square show cards without cutting off the hat
The community theater I help with has a lobby wall of black-painted plywood, a box of push pins, and a tradition that every show in the season gets a square card: title, dates, and one photograph of a moment we are not ashamed to have strangers stare at while they wait for the house to open. The wall is a grid. The printer who donates the card stock cuts perfect squares. The photographs, historically, are anything but.
Most of our rehearsal shots are taken in the wings by whoever has a free hand. They are vertical, because people are vertical, and because the person with the camera is usually trying to catch a hat, a cane, or a pair of shoes that matter to the blocking. When a well-meaning volunteer dropped those vertical frames into a make-it-square preset last spring, the leading lady of the operetta lost the hat that the entire plot depends on. The hat was the joke. The crop made her look merely startled. We had already printed forty cards before anyone noticed.
I ended up with the unglamorous job of building a method that would survive three more shows and a revolving door of volunteers.
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