The Christening
The Brief
Create and brand a film festival to a theme of your choosing.
My Role
Graphic Designer, market researcher, logo design
Introduction
To date this has to be one of my favourite projects, I mean who wouldn’t love a project dedicated to the Chris’ of Hollywood. As a lover of action movies and men named Chris, I had to hand it to myself, coming up with this festival really felt like a stroke of genius. But this festival was so much more then staring at and drawing handsome actors. It was hours of learning and designing, scrapping everything, and starting again. It was research, late nights, tears when Illustrator refused to connect two lines and trying to move everything by a single millimetre because I was convinced it was off. But it was also seeing all the elements finally come together and my vision realised.
The Audience
Its all well and good to create something you like but everything has to have an audience, and this was no exception. To design well one must understand who they are designing for. As the brief stated this was to be a University Guild hosted event and as such a large portion of the audience would be young adults and university students. So, this was geared to the young adult action movie buffs and casual fans alike. The posters didn’t pull from obscure scenes and references putting the lead character centre focus, with a good sense of humour to back it. An easily accessible design that told the audience exactly what to expect and drew them in with bright colours and humour.
The Brand
As a film festival the brand has a very clear tone and voice. Its balances the action hero movies with the more comedic theme and branding. A key point of emphasis on this project was about unifying and keeping consistency across several products and designs, and as such having a strong brand identity was key here. The stain glass windows went a long way in unifying and solidifying the brand and having a few key layouts there could be repeated through the deliverables.
The Name
The name of a festival such as this has a lot to convey in a short space of time and after much experimentation The Christening was chosen. It strikes a fun balance between the comedic religious theme in the design and the more serious action hero genre of the movies. It also works as a pun of sorts with the name Chris being at the beginning of the word, this was fortunate as it required no changing of the spelling to make the name fit.
Colour
Colour played a large part in this project, however there wasn’t one true colour scheme. Each poster stayed close to the original colour schemes associated with the film e.g Superman used red, blue and yellow. As many of these films already had strong colour associations this helped to convey the theme of both the festival and the movie itself. In keeping with this when choosing the colours for the line-up poster a key colour was taken from each poster to create a pattern, taking similar shades and tones into consideration the colours harmonised well with each other and brought the characters to the fore focus of the design.
