For his senior project at Merrimack Valley High School, Trevor Warren turned a handful of his classmates into movie stars.
Warren is no magician, though. Nor does he have James Cameron's number in his cell phone. (Kirk Cameron's? Maybe.) What he does have is a sharp eye for monster movie style and an appreciation for the classic horror genre, talents he combined to create a half-dozen movie posters currently on display in the Community Gallery at Red River Theatres.
The films are imaginary – variations on cult horror classics concocted by Warren – and the models are fellow students from Merrimack Valley. But the results are posters authentic enough in appearance that when he posted a few at the high school, students began asking him when the first movie was set to hit theaters.
“I've always like Halloween and monsters, and I've always been interested in art and the style of things.” Warren said. “I looked at things like rock and roll and high fashion and then took characters and tried to make them more rock and roll, more stylized. I wanted to give it an authentic feel. I wanted to take the movies but remake them the way I would see them.”
He turned Melina Caron into Dona the Dead, Becka Landry into Franken Babe, Sadie Blouin into Lady Hex and Justin Connor into The Rad Scientist. Logan Graham traded his face for a skeleton's and grabbed an electric guitar as the star of Heavy Metal Nightmare, and Warren turned himself into the lead character in Motor Head Monster.
Dressing up in outlandish outfits and heading deep into the woods at all hours of the night may not be out of the ordinary for most high school students, but these participants at least have official keepsakes that aren't just on their Facebook pages.
“The project was so much fun to work on,” Caron said. “Trevor has an amazing eye for detail, and the outfit he put together for my shoot was amazing, as was the set he created. I loved how real it was; I was dressed up as a zombie, literally sitting in a hole in the ground. When I saw the finished product, I absolutely loved it. I actually was jumping with excitement. I was blown away with how professionally done it came out.”
Warren was ahead of the game from the start, nailing down the focus of his senior project before he had completed his junior year. After connecting with Erin Fitzgerald, an art teacher at Merrimack Valley who became his mentor, Warren began the first project with a photo shoot last April and put the finishing touches on the final poster last month.
“He's never taken a photography class, but he wanted to push himself to learn different photo techniques. He had all the ideas,” Fitzgerald said. “His work, it looks professional. It's really high-quality work. Everything, from his ideas and from conception to completion how he orchestrated everything, it seemed to go off very well.”
Warren also sought the assistance of professional photographer Robert Morrill, who was behind the camera at all of the
