The most memorable scene from Cervantes’ Don Quixote has the titular character and his sidekick charging against a horde of giants – imaginary giants that were actually stationery windmills. In a nod to Don Quixote‘s whimsical absurdity, our poster features the concert program printed and folded onto a paper pinwheel. The pinwheel was mounted on a cello bow, since Strauss’ rendition of the story portrays Don Quixote with a solo cello.

Our original idea involved photographing a cellist battling an oversized pinwheel, but that seemed a little too complicated. Instead, we put on our best crafting faces and spent an afternoon in Irene’s common room cutting, drawing, folding, pinning, and mounting our pinwheels onto rolled-up Chipotle napkins (a handy last-minute improvisation, if you couldn’t tell), and photographed them against her hipster concrete wall.

When we finally figured out how we wanted the text on the pinwheel itself to look, I printed the final version and pinned/taped it to a cello bow – a crappy plastic bow that we borrowed from Jeremy (who got it from one of his labmates who found it on the side of the road). To hold the bow upright, I used a trick from my incense-burning grandparents and stuck it in a glass filled with rice. Sam and I then took it over to the Berkeley Marina – the closest thing we have to the Spanish countryside – and took photographed the pinwheel during golden hour.

2015-11-22 16.31.51 HDR

We originally wanted to keep the same text placement that we used in the two other posters we made this season, but the balance seemed a little off, and after some strong urging from Alia, I played around with it until I found something cleaner.

2015-Dec Final highres

Design Team: Irene Kim & Jiazhen Chen
Additional support from: Samantha Raja, Alia McKean, Jeremy Amon