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Friday, June 20, 2014

Graphic Details: A Visual Identity for BAMcinemaFest 2014

by Katie Positerry




BAMcinemaFest kicked off this week with Boyhood at the BAM Harvey Theater. To celebrate the festival, the BAM design team pulled back the curtain to reveal some of the thought process behind the visual identity of this year's festival.

In six short years, BAMcinemaFest has grown into one of the primary New York springboards for emerging filmmakers. It introduced New York audiences to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, and many others—films that have gone on to win international acclaim and make waves both in and beyond the indie film scene.

The identity for this year’s BAMcinemaFest was inspired by this—a festival of emerging voices in American independent cinema. The design features typography that quite literally emerges—whether from the printed page or on screen.

Inspiration
Shown below is a preliminary mood-board full of inspirations from Saul Bass’ quintessential movie titles to René Ferracci’s iconic typographic posters done for Cannes in the 1970s. I was really drawn to the bold colors, drama, and personality of the letterforms.


Typography
In creating the typography, I wanted to evoke the same sense of theatricality and playfulness, while remaining sophisticated and true to the BAM brand. Shown here is the alphabet I created based off of BAM's signature font, News Gothic. Redrawing News Gothic into a double line display face gave it the line quality and weight that we were looking for. The letterforms also mimic the structure of typography you might find in a neon sign, creating a visual metaphor for light and illumination.






Visual Language
The next step was to further establish the visual language for the festival by setting the mood and tone. To do this, I introduced another element of light to the piece, a vector spotlight to illuminate certain elements in the design and add a little more drama. Shown below are screen grabs from the trailer and imagery used to share the festival on Facebook.



Festival Trailer
The promotional trailer became a mashup of the letterforms and spotlights slowly being revealed, to the end point—"Join us for BAMCINEMAFEST." Shown below is a preliminary storyboard for the trailer.


Marketing Campaign Rollout
Once the key creative was established, we rolled out the rest of the campaign and applied it to lightpole banners, subway ads, brochures, posters, totes, and more.






Come and experience the festival for yourself! Info: BAM.org/BAMcinemaFest.

Katie Positerry is part of the BAM in-house design team. Originally hailing from Louisiana, she is currently based in Brooklyn, NY, and was formerly part of the SVA MFA Designer as Author & Entrepreneur program.

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