After lunch we headed to the Black Box Collective, on Central near Parramore. It’s described as “a non-profit center for art, music and activism. A show space that is open to all people for use of skill shares alike.” This is a place where street artists hone their painting skills. As we approached, music was blasting from one of the small buildings that makes up the Black Box. Apparently they were preparing for an event that was to take place there later that night. We wandered the property admiring the paintings and tags that completely cover every building. There are several sculptures around the compound as well. After firing off a few frames, we headed back to the studio to finish up our day’s work feeling full and inspired.

An homage to the Battle of the Bulge movie poster.

‘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!

It was fun for us, and we hope it was fun for them, too. After all, everything is better together!

This is always a great event. If you haven’t been, go this year. The space will be filled with paintings, drawings, sculpture, mixed media, installations and performance art, all based on the nude. There will also be live entertainment including, you guessed it, burlesque. The Orlando show will be just off Virginia Drive at 503 Brookhaven Drive, February 11-13. The show will happen again in Tampa at 1910 Ola Avenue, March 4-6.

If there was a such a band to hit it big via hype, then Surfer Blood would be one of them. Being my first listen, I became excited to hear what all the hullaballoo was about. Pretty solid musically, but the vocals never really took shape for me. My friends tell me the album is awesome, so I’ll judge later.

Which leads me to the craziest headliner to date-Monotonix. Insane comes to mind, but probably best described as man flesh madness, since none of them were wearing anything more than gym shorts and body hair. They brought down the wall between performer and audience, groping their way through the crowd, onto the streets, avoiding the stage wherever possible. Your almost convinced this is some sort of performance art, as at one point, man and drum were actually held aloft by the crowd. My first thought is definitely a show to see, not to hear. But as the band was was asurf in a tide of raised hands, spinning and rolling, they never missed a beat. Considering the chaos at hand, Chris Anderson of Parafora Presents said it best “No one can follow Monotonix.”