RenderThis Film Festival
BrockTV, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario
BrockTV, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario
January 2014 saw the fourth annual BrockTV RenderThis Student Film Festival. Aside from having a really long title, the festival saw the premiere of seven astonishing student works, and entertained 150 people. After a long preperation, the event could be called fairly successful. This is an account, in the pure design field, of the work that went into this year's RenderThis.
When we started in the summer of 2013, we at BrockTV knew we had a lot of time to play with the ultimate look of the festival. So I banked that thinking into the logo, and started figuring out what the core direction of the festival would be.
Ultimately, BrockTV really liked the idea of the spotlights. A heavy theme in RenderThis, ever since its conception, was the idea of spotlighting student filmmakers, along with the obvious references to film culture and Hollywood. Note that the spotlights aren't just idylic in their design, but also serve to provide the "4th annual" reference by creating a Roman Numeric IV. I also tried to work in layering in terms of the elements of the logo, as well as refreshing the render wheel, from the previous year, to keep in theme.
BrockTV wanted to garner some investments, especially in terms of prizing, resulting in a brochure for partners to get involved with the community.
I divided the festival's target audience into those who watch movies and those who make them, and I knew that we had to handle them differently. So we started with filmmakers. A filmmaker, I thought, would want the info more than the advertisement spin, so that's what we went for. This was our letter to student filmmakers in Niagara College and Brock University.
These are the on-campus posters to garner films. A change in scheduling resulted in delaying the submissing date.
All in all we recieved six RenderThis submissions, and another funded by the Student Filmmaker Fund: Woods. I wanted to give them a certain level of Hollywood treatment, therefore I chose to go a minimalist style on each of the posters. This way, each poster could retain its feel while adhereing to the film festival design styles.
This was a series of images that were supposed to encapsulate to an extent what movies made you feel. As a filmmaker and storytellers, I understand what power words and images have and ideally each image would be representative of the words written above. These images were used in most promotional materials and would later go on to be animated, and used in the intro for the event night.
Since in this day and age people barely stop to look at posters, social media was our primary source of marketing. These images were created as Facebook coverphotos for the RenderThis page.
Finally, when it comes down to it, RenderThis is a film festival. That means winners are celebrated, prizes given away, and a nod to each and every person that made it happen. For the filmmakers, we wanted to give them a momento of their night at the festival, mainly these.
Thank you for looking! :)
Feel free to click the links below to check out the evolution of the festival over 4 years!
