The Florida Film Festival, produced by Enzian, is one of the premiere cultural events that takes place in Central Florida. The little festival that started in 1992 in Maitland, Florida has grown into one of the best regional film festivals in the country—featuring over 150 films in ten days. The festival hosts over 100 film industry professionals and over 25,000 attendees. Over the past 18 years, we’ve worked with the festival many times, developing advertising and collateral materials.  In recent years, this process has begun with a casual meeting of all the key players, sharing thoughts and ideas about the festival as a whole. Basically, we sit back and listen (with cocktails, of course)—occasionally asking questions or adding input to the conversation, taking in all we can. Out of this meeting, comes a pretty clear direction on where we should take the creative. This year, we landed on the festival’s reputation for having an unpretentious, warm, and welcoming atmosphere. Filmmakers and film-goers alike feel comfortable and at home at the Florida Film Festival. And so, the mission of the campaign was to a deliver a sense of home coupled with a sense of southern hospitality.

‘The South’ and ‘Florida’ are not exactly synonymous. The south is plantations, boiled peanuts, sweet tea, and big oaks. Florida is swamps, alligators, palm trees and beaches. So, in our creative exploration, some of our ideas had a more Floridian angle and some were more truly southern. We partnered with our pals at Think Creative and one of the first things that got us excited was the line, “Film Sweet Film.” An obvious play on “Home Sweet Home.” The idea of presenting the line in cross stitching seemed like an excellent way to give it the right southern feel, however, we did foresee a challenge of not making it feel like your grandma’s film festival.

These images are just concepts and not presented as final executions, so give us a break, we know these are pretty rough.

Then there were the more comedic southern lines about boiled peanuts and grits.

Another concept that came out of the process was the ‘fresh squeezed’ reference. For the most part, the festival features new films from young filmmakers. The fresh squeezed idea spoke clearly of that aspect of the festival’s content and becomes an obvious nod to fresh squeezed Florida orange juice with these visuals. The first of these would be a sort of refined orange crate label; the second, a more traditional orange crate label that would hopefully have gone a little bit kitsch in final execution; and third, a WPA style poster.

Another visual solution was to create a collage that brought together images that referenced the south and film. This was so we could invoke the feeling loosely without directly referencing that Florida was a part of the south.

One last thought we had was more silly than anything else. On researching, we had seen a few film festival posters where a person’s head was replaced with a camera. Looking at some record reviews, we noticed an album cover with a lone chicken on it. Why not a chicken with a camera in place of it’s head for our southern fried festival?

After presenting everything and much discussion, the client feedback was that they preferred  three concepts and wanted to know if they could be combined. A common request to which designers usually grumble, saying that what we do isn’t like buying Garanimals where you can mix and match everything. Luckily, one of the executions they liked was the collage. We figured we could easily combine the chicken with the ‘film sweet film’ in a collage, and here is the final result!