Aurora Film Festival Identity
Corporate identity consisting of a logo, stationery set, multi-peice package design and style manual
I chose to work with the name Aurora because of the many signifiers that are associated with the word. Aurora is the Roman goddess of the dawn. In this mythology Aurora renews herself over again everyday. With this renewal she flies over the horizon and announces the arrival of the sun as it appears.
Because of the constant renewal that Aurora is under a connotation of being current and fresh is signified. Also because of her associations with the sun, you could apply the concepts of energy and life to the adjectives describing Aurora.
Also associated with this term is the northern/southern lights, or aurora borealis, that affect the extreme northern and southern skies. The aurora borealis are natural light displays in the sky, usually observed at night, particularly in the polar regions. They typically occur in the ionosphere. They are also referred to as polar auroras. Auroras seen near the magnetic pole illuminate the northern horizon with a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red hue, as if the sun were rising from an unusual northern direction. The aurora borealis most often occurs near the equinoxes. The expressive colors and movement in the sky speak towards what the goddess Aurora represented.
The modern day film festival has become a place for experimentation, a venue for filmmakers to express personal as well as global opinions and an opportunity for a breakout career to spawn. Film festivals often feature movies at an elementary stage, or concepts at the ground floor. Large budget, feature films are not often found in film festival scenarios, but many do evolve from it. The world of short films allows filmmakers even more experimentation because of the relatively low cost of production and a naturally under developed story line. These story lines allow for directors as well as filmmakers to try new camera techniques and post production models that are often adapted to mainstream film at a later date.
Also I think there is an interesting discussion as to the way the aurora borealis shines light and projects various colors into the sky in much the same way that a projector shines light through film to project color and picture in a movie theater.
The aesthetics of my Aurora Film Festival identity were developed through research involving the interests of contemporary filmmakers. Much the same as the field of graphic design, the film industry went through a whirlwind after the implementation of computers and a digital workflow. There is an argument going on between filmmakers that are not happy with the quality of current digital film making and the ones that prefer the accessibility and cost reductions that are associated with digital filming. This argument spans all demographics of the filmmaking industry with a push from the older generation to try new things and a sort of renaissance from a younger generation to respect the way things have been done for a long time. I wanted my logo to abstractly show how this argument or analog versus digital could exist together.
The logotype I developed was built on a modular system of nine squares per character. Using this grid I created a typeface that has an extremely pixilated look to it. This aesthetic of anti-aliased type speaks to the digital side of filmmaking. The modular system represents the pixels on a screen or in a digital file. A contrasting shape of a period circle displays the analogue side of print or film. Because a screen can only display the illusion of curves a circular shape could only be created be traditional techniques. So these two contrasting shapes successfully display the two sides of the current filmmaking argument together as one. The words, film festival, are displayed in the typeface folio. This face is a realist sans serif similar to the likes of Helvetica and Univers. This face speaks to the international typographic style, which works with the ideas of universal communication and clarity. These ideals also resonate in filmmaking as a medium to communicate in an extremely accessible way.
logo
Stationery
