Every year since 2022, cosplayer-and-larper Deana Vazquez has hired me to photograph a special session for her birthday. Every year, Deana has created a different theme for her birthday. The past Deana birthday sessions include:
Fey and LARP Characters in the Woods and in Studio (2022)
Pirates and Mermaids on the Beach (2023)
Moon-Themed Characters in Studio (2024)
Witches in the Woods (2025)
In 2026, Deana wanted to make a Star Wars style poster.
Planning the Concept
Early in the summer, Deana and I sat down at Charmer’s Cafe in Rogers Park to discuss the poster idea and how to make it happen. Initially, we thought this might be an onsite shoot, but we didn’t have immediate ideas for where, and once we started discussing the poster idea in detail, we concluded most Star wars posters don’t feature interior locations. Rather, they’re composites of characters, usually on a background of stars.
Rethinking our shoot for the studio minimized complications and allowed us greater control of light and conditions. We set a shoot date for late June 2026.
The Shoot: A Rogues’ Gallery of the Outer Rim
In late June, Deana, Tim, John, Nathan, Sara, and Liz attended the poster shoot. Each dressed as a character in the Star Wars style—not necessarily Rebels or Imperials but rather the sort of scoundrels, rogues, bounty hunters, and bureaucrats that tend to operate on the fringes, in the Outer Rim territory. Deana specifically wanted to be a “gray,” neutral character. With the exception of Liz (wearing Mara Jade), the characters are defined by the viewer’s imagination.
When I belonged to the Star Wars Fan Club, circa 1983, I used to receive the Bantha Tracks newsletter and had the promotional postcard for the upcoming film Revenge of the Jedi. The cardboard backing of the action figures showed pictures the available figures, with the upcoming figures for (the then-renamed) Return of the Jedi blacked out, so you knew their names, but you didn’t see what they looked like before the movie was released. This poster is like that, but in reverse.
“The lore just really wants me to be an outcast 😂”
Deana Vazquez on the poster concept:
“I will admit that I was a latecomer to the world of Star Wars. It’s a fandom that drew me in because I befriended so many fans of the universe so I didn’t watch the films until my twenties. What immediately captivated me was how expansive the world felt; it takes place in a galaxy far far away which means anything and everything can exist between us and that galaxy.
It comes as no surprise that since the original trilogy we’ve had books and shows and movies that all push to explore what else exists between the world of Jedi and Sith, and that’s really what I wanted to do this year.
So that kind of became the theme of my poster, to fill it with people that existed between the light and dark Force, different shades of grey that have almost taken advantage of the fact that people try to ignore them. After all, they get what they want when no one is looking.”
I revamped an old LARP character that I felt fit in perfectly within the universe but needed her own space regarding the force. Jedi or Sith didn’t feel right, but I knew she’d be a Force user, and as I was researching lore I found myself particularly inspired by the Revanites because they believed in a balance of the light and dark Force, understanding that both were necessary to have harmony in the universe.
Deana Vazquez
Inspiration and Reference
Prior to the shoot, Deana and I looked at a number of Star Wars posters to see how they were put together. We took most of our inspiration from the “sequel-trilogy” posters, particularly the way space is divided and the characters are positioned, often with lightsaber blades cutting up the space, and Hollywood’s favorite red/blue or blue/orange color complements washing over the characters. There are often ships or battles or explosions on the outskirts of the character groups, and there is usually a background of stars. The most important characters are usually larger and more central. That would be Deana in our poster.
Another common element is the looming presence of a character in the background, usually a villain. The original films used Darth Vader’s helmet for this.
I also noticed that the poster characters tended to be lit dramatically, often with harder shadows rather than portrait-style soft light. This informed my decision on how to shoot the session.
Lighting
For this shoot, I focused on the mission, which was to shoot stock for a poster, with the poster being the end product, rather than individual portraits, which would have been a whole other job. I therefore photographed each character on a black background, making them straightforward to cut out and forgiving of masking imperfections, especially if that character is placed on a field of dark space and stars.
Most of the characters had lightsabers. I therefore focused my fresnel as the main light on each character and blocked excess light from my key. I gelled my fill light with a color of gel that matched the color of the character’s lightsaber. Hence the red shadows on Tim’s character and the purple ones on Sara’s, for example.
We moved through a variety of poses for each character, usually directing the character’s focus in three-quarter profile. We shot a few action scenes, in case there was room on the poster for one of them.
At the end of the shoot, as I was thinking through the poster, I noticed Sara’s helmet. We had captured some photos with her wearing it, some where she had it under her arm, and others where she didn’t have the helmet at all, when she wielded two lightsabers. I asked Sara about the character and the importance of the helmet; she said it wasn’t important to the character at all. We hadn’t determined whether any of the characters was Deana’s antagonist. I wondered whether we could use the helmet as a separate villainous character, looming over them all like Darth Vader. So we did another sequence of shots with Sara wearing the helmet, for use as that separate character.
A Wrinkle in Time
We had photographed the poster between the Origins Game Fair and the July 4th weekend. I turned over proofs of the session to Deana right away and asked for her to choose the image of her that she’d like to be the central figure. I wanted to know that first, as the lightsaber position would then determine what poses from the other characters I would place around her. Deana reviewed the options, and just as she picked her pose, Gen Con week 2026 began and all my time evaporated for six weeks. (As of this writing, I still haven’t had a chance to post Gen Con yet!). At the end of August, once I had turned over everything I owed on a deadline, I returned to Deana’s birthday project and began to composite the poster at last.
Compositing the Poster
To begin, I researched the dimensions of movie posters and created a new Photoshop file in those dimensions, 27 x 40.
I placed the image Deana selected at the center and then cut out all the other characters individually and threw them into the same file in different layers. Then I began to move them around like paper dolls, placing them here, placing them there, increasing the canvas size, and so on. I placed the helmet in the background and added some Star Wars text at the bottom. I visited NASA’s image and video library and placed some stars on the background.
Special Effects
Let’s talk about some of the special effects in the poster.
Oniric
I did the lightsaber glows with the Oniric plugin, which had stopped working properly earlier in the summer when I didn’t need it and then conveniently began working again with some behind-the-scenes engineering from the Oniric team and a Photoshop update. There were lots of sabers in this poster, so Oniric was a very convenient tool in glowing up those lights and the eyes of the mask behind the characters.
Learning about Blaster Bolt Colors in Star Wars
I looked for a blast effect for John’s gun and found a video explaining the different colors of blaster fire in Star Wars, which made a strange amount of sense. John said he was holding a shotgun but liked the purple blaster effect. I later replaced the purple blaster with a shotgun blast.
Ship Models on Sketchfab
I wanted some ships, so I searched around until I discovered a Blender 3D TIE-Fighter model by Daniel Anderson on Sketchfab, with creative commons license to use in projects, as well as a YT-2400 ship I remembered as Dash Rendar’s Outrider from the Shadows of the Empire media event/crossover from the late 1990s and was added to the Star Wars Special Edition… as well as a Star Destroyer (thank you, Daniel!). It made sense that the YT-2400 ship model might be used by these characters. All of the 3D ships were then cut out and masked in Photoshop.
NASA Again
The bottom of the frame was looking empty, but I stumbled on a picture of Earth in NASA’s library, turned it on its side, made it a different color, and expanded it behind John and Sara. It was such an easy fix, it prompted me to text the picture to Deana with the comment, “Photo compositing is dumb.”
Infinite Texture Panel
Then I added some drama to the TIE-Fighter and YT-2400 pursuit in the lower left corner by motion blurs behind the ships and adding an explosion from my Infinite Texture Panel plugin.
At this point, I noticed most of the Star Wars text on posters is not yellow but outlined in white, so I made that change and re-learned how to fill the letters with the same stars as are in the background of the main image.
Boris Optics FX
At one point, Deana asked whether I could add some more space around the characters and if there could be a moon in the image, since the moon is an important symbol for her (as shown in our past work together). I opened up yet another plugin, Boris Optics FX, found a representation of Earth’s moon, turned it all around, changed its color, and dropped it in. I added a bit of halo on the outside, so it looked more like the planets you see in Star Wars.
While I was in Boris Optics, I found a representation of a shotgun blast to replace the purple bolts I’d used on John’s gun. I also found a streaking ray effect that worked for the pursuing TIE-Fighters’ blasts.
Jumping from thing to thing during this process, I added Star Destroyers to the top of the poster, around the moon and decided that Deana’s lightsaber should be the light source for them rather than the planet.
Around this time, I’d filled up the space with so much, there wasn’t room for more. I tried to add a droid, but there was nowhere to put it. I sent the image to Deana, who said, “I think I’m gonna cry,” and so we were done!
Process Texts
Along the way, I texted the process to Deana to show her what I was doing and hear what she thought. I’ll include some of those process texts here.
“A poster for a movie I’d love to watch…”
“I’m so happy with how the poster turned out.
I’ve always loved how much story they can fit into one poster, and as a storyteller I knew that was how I needed to approach this theme.
Every image tells a story, just enough to pull you in with curiosity as you try to piece together how everyone is connected and guess what kind of movie you’d be walking into.
I wanted to make a poster for a movie I’d love to watch, and I truly believe the story potential here would make for a great addition to the universe.”
Deana Vazquez
Happy Birthday 2026, Deana
So that was Deana’s birthday project for 2026, and what a fun and different project it was from what we’ve done in previous years. Thanks to Deana for her collaboration, imagination, talent, and support.
If I had months to work on the poster, maybe I’d try aggressively color grading it in the style of different Star Wars posters, or adding painterly textures for a Drew Struzan style, or find ways to add droids. Lots and lots and lots of droids.
This is the first Star Wars poster I’ve made but not the first Star Wars-themed project. Perhaps on a future May the Fourth, I’ll remember to do a compilation post that rounds up all the previous posts into a gallery. For now, check out the Star Wars keyword on the Traveller, which combines all most of these.
