‘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!

Intern, Timothy Meadows, printing the first plate.

When I’m working on a gigposter, I’m usually digging into the band’s lyrics to find inspiration for a visual idea. In the case of Russian Circles, that isn’t possible. They are an instrumental band. Save for song titles, there are no words involved at all. So the effort is to attempt to capture something about the band.

So this was my first thought. I’m not even sure where this idea came from other than seeing an old black and white head shot on some website where the eyes were blacked out with a black box. I thought it would be interesting to just remove the eyes altogether and cut the type out of this extended forehead. In the end, I just thought it didn’t work so well and didn’t mean anything. You can see I didn’t finish the 3D effect on the type.

I was really struggling trying to find and idea for these guys. I spent the better part of a morning just looking at old magazines, old text books, steel engravings and listening to their music stream on MySpace. I also watched some live videos of the band performing on YouTube. I was pretty much in awe of how much sound they were creating as a three piece. Then I saw this in a book on auto repair:

I started to imagine this ignition distributor as a mysterious machine rising out of the ground, but in a very large scale. I did a quick thumbnail and was pretty convinced I could make this idea work. It would capture that sense of awe I had watching and listening to them play. Big, expansive, layered music made with simple machines. Drums, bass and guitar.

From there is was a matter of execution. I looked at photographic landscapes but quickly abandoned that idea. It could have worked, but would have taken too much time to finesse. I also wanted this to read very quickly, so I tried a more graphic approach to creating a landscape.

The black hole on the white background was not working. It needed some color to ground the image. I roughed in some figures to create the scale I was looking for–knowing I’d need to photograph these myself to get the point of view correct.

The idea was working. The composition was simple and graphic. But it was missing something. It needed another level of visual interest. That lead me to the idea of the glow coming from the hole.

From there it was just a matter of photographing the figures and adding some shading to create a little depth at the bottom of the poster. Well, and working out the type, of course. Here’s the final poster: