Before designing anything,
I want to learn as much as possible from the client.
It probably seems obvious,
but I need to know what the Sundance Film Festival represented,
who the audience was,
how this was communicated,
and why did it exist in the first place?
Basically it's what, who,
how, and why.
Now the internet is a great resource for some early research,
but at a certain point I want more depth than a Wikipedia page.
And we all know that not everything you find online is particularly truthful.
I interviewed people inside and outside the organization,
I collected all past Sundance Film Festival materials,
I looked at attendance and merchandise sales at the festival, and
I scoured the internet for good or
bad commentary.
All of this is great for me to understand the real issues,
rather than just making another nice poster.
Most importantly, and above all else,
I absolutely needed to hear from the founder, Robert Redford.
He
knows the brand spirit and has an intuitive sense of what it stands for and what it should be.
Ignoring this because a focus group might have said that they thought Sundance Film Festival should be edgy would be a huge error.
It's Robert Redford's brand,
and he knows it better than anyone.
The most important thing I can do when meeting with a client is to listen.
I
don't jump to conclusions,
I don't contradict them with boring pragmatic issues, or
suppose that I know the right solution.
I listen.
There are no bad ideas.
And
even something that seems impossible may lead to a great concept.
Here's what I learned,
and I will cover presenting this information to the client in another lesson.
From the research, I determined all the points of contact that a viewer had with the festival.
This
helped me work with form and color later,
once I knew the work would be printed on posters with CMYK, and on screen,
with RGB values.
I
also found that the point of contact that was the most effective was
the area that we should tackle first,
in this instance, printed materials.
Now, most clients will tell you that their audience is everybody,
and that's a little too broad.
So
I identified the audience and the list of Sundance brand attributes.
Both
of these are going to help justify my creative choices when I present the design solution later.
I also wanted to identify the brand attributes for Sundance.
This
also helps when I choose a color later.
For example, if the attribute is courageous,
simple primary colors or pastels may not work as well,
and I may need a more unique choice.
For each year's festival,
Robert Redford focuses on a different aspect of filmmaking.
Here,
for this festival, on the beginning, the genesis of an idea.
Or
the language of film.
And
the independent and pioneer spirit.
For this festival year,
he was especially interested in narrative and storytelling,
which is what all film is about.
To be honest, storytelling is a huge subject.
How
could I make this visual?
For
me, it was back to more research.
I immediately thought about a passage from the book The White Album by Joan Didion.
It
guided me to see storytelling as not just entertainment,
but as a human need.
I checked out books from the library about the history of filmmaking,
literature,
and the most useful,
Joseph Campbell's book on myths,
The Hero's Journey.
Yes,
I actually read these books.
I
watched films that relied on a strong mythical and classical narrative,
such as Star Wars,
or The Seven Samurai,
Belle du Jour, and even Battlestar Galactica.
Based
on the information I gathered, I
made a list of words that are common attributes of most narratives.
Of course, again, there's a huge amount of themes and concepts in storytelling,
but
I'm designing materials for a film festival.
I'm not writing a thesis.
These
turned out to be good versus evil,
coming of age, a life change, betrayal,
life and death, justice, family,
and power.
I collected any images I thought might be relevant to the idea of storytelling and Sundance.
I started with black and white photography to study scenes and how we read a narrative image.
How is it composed that lets us understand that story?
I
did the same thing with color images to see how a color might change the tone or the idea,
such as the red station wagon.
If
it were black and white,
would it mean something different?
And documentary-style photography,
does the meaning come from the color itself?
Surprisingly,
the research librarian pointed me to Norman Rockwell's work.
Some may deride it as sentimental,
but Rockwell could tell an enormous story,
showing the pivotal point with symbols,
settings, and
universal human experiences.
The
color and tone immediately connects us to a similar moment in our own life,
such as being the new kid in the neighborhood and wondering if one would get along with the other kids.
Here,
the baseball mitts and items like the pink dress and bow on the other girl tell us that it will probably work out just fine.
The
images from the Sundance archive gave me a sense of the tone and attitude, casual,
hardworking, and exciting.
The
color images from their archive related
to the brand attributes.
These were extremely inspirational.
If we're communicating the pioneer spirit,
the audience has preconceptions about that color palette already.
Once
I wrap up the research,
I understand the brand,
the concept, audience,
and the points of contact.
I also have a deeper understanding of the idea through reading, collecting visual references,
and watching some pretty darn good films.
That's not a bad job.
Next
steps are to start making the idea visual.