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Before designing anything,

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I want to learn as much as possible from the client.

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It probably seems obvious,

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but I need to know what the Sundance Film Festival represented,

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who the audience was,

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how this was communicated,

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and why did it exist in the first place?

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Basically it's what, who,

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how, and why.

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Now the internet is a great resource for some early research,

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but at a certain point I want more depth than a Wikipedia page.

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And we all know that not everything you find online is particularly truthful.

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I interviewed people inside and outside the organization,

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I collected all past Sundance Film Festival materials,

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I looked at attendance and merchandise sales at the festival, and

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I scoured the internet for good or

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bad commentary.

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All of this is great for me to understand the real issues,

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rather than just making another nice poster.

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Most importantly, and above all else,

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I absolutely needed to hear from the founder, Robert Redford.

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He

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knows the brand spirit and has an intuitive sense of what it stands for and what it should be.

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Ignoring this because a focus group might have said that they thought Sundance Film Festival should be edgy would be a huge error.

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It's Robert Redford's brand,

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and he knows it better than anyone.

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The most important thing I can do when meeting with a client is to listen.

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I

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don't jump to conclusions,

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I don't contradict them with boring pragmatic issues, or

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suppose that I know the right solution.

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I listen.

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There are no bad ideas.

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And

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even something that seems impossible may lead to a great concept.

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Here's what I learned,

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and I will cover presenting this information to the client in another lesson.

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From the research, I determined all the points of contact that a viewer had with the festival.

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This

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helped me work with form and color later,

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once I knew the work would be printed on posters with CMYK, and on screen,

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with RGB values.

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I

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also found that the point of contact that was the most effective was

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the area that we should tackle first,

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in this instance, printed materials.

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Now, most clients will tell you that their audience is everybody,

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and that's a little too broad.

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So

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I identified the audience and the list of Sundance brand attributes.

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Both

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of these are going to help justify my creative choices when I present the design solution later.

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I also wanted to identify the brand attributes for Sundance.

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This

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also helps when I choose a color later.

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For example, if the attribute is courageous,

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simple primary colors or pastels may not work as well,

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and I may need a more unique choice.

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For each year's festival,

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Robert Redford focuses on a different aspect of filmmaking.

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Here,

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for this festival, on the beginning, the genesis of an idea.

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Or

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the language of film.

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And

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the independent and pioneer spirit.

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For this festival year,

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he was especially interested in narrative and storytelling,

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which is what all film is about.

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To be honest, storytelling is a huge subject.

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How

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could I make this visual?

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For

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me, it was back to more research.

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I immediately thought about a passage from the book The White Album by Joan Didion.

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It

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guided me to see storytelling as not just entertainment,

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but as a human need.

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I checked out books from the library about the history of filmmaking,

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literature,

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and the most useful,

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Joseph Campbell's book on myths,

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The Hero's Journey.

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Yes,

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I actually read these books.

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I

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watched films that relied on a strong mythical and classical narrative,

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such as Star Wars,

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or The Seven Samurai,

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Belle du Jour, and even Battlestar Galactica.

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Based

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on the information I gathered, I

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made a list of words that are common attributes of most narratives.

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Of course, again, there's a huge amount of themes and concepts in storytelling,

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but

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I'm designing materials for a film festival.

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I'm not writing a thesis.

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These

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turned out to be good versus evil,

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coming of age, a life change, betrayal,

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life and death, justice, family,

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and power.

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I collected any images I thought might be relevant to the idea of storytelling and Sundance.

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I started with black and white photography to study scenes and how we read a narrative image.

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How is it composed that lets us understand that story?

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I

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did the same thing with color images to see how a color might change the tone or the idea,

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such as the red station wagon.

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If

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it were black and white,

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would it mean something different?

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And documentary-style photography,

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does the meaning come from the color itself?

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Surprisingly,

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the research librarian pointed me to Norman Rockwell's work.

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Some may deride it as sentimental,

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but Rockwell could tell an enormous story,

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showing the pivotal point with symbols,

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settings, and

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universal human experiences.

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The

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color and tone immediately connects us to a similar moment in our own life,

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such as being the new kid in the neighborhood and wondering if one would get along with the other kids.

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Here,

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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.

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The

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images from the Sundance archive gave me a sense of the tone and attitude, casual,

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hardworking, and exciting.

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The

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color images from their archive related

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to the brand attributes.

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These were extremely inspirational.

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If we're communicating the pioneer spirit,

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the audience has preconceptions about that color palette already.

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Once

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I wrap up the research,

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I understand the brand,

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the concept, audience,

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and the points of contact.

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I also have a deeper understanding of the idea through reading, collecting visual references,

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and watching some pretty darn good films.

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That's not a bad job.

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Next

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steps are to start making the idea visual.