The second annual EcoFocus Film Festival is occurring during this month of October—with 2 or 3 feature-length films showing per week, as well as 3 blocks of shorts. Most films will show at Ciné, 234 W. Hancock Street in downtown Athens, Georgia.Last year, Candy worked with festival director Sara Beresford on the 2008 EcoFocus Film Festival to design the 16-page program and a promotional postcard. Coming late to the process, Candy was working with the logo and campaign visuals that had already been developed—but we were able to provide useful assistance through marketing advice and production of those pieces.
This year, Candy's role expanded to include responsibility for all of the design elements for the 2009 festival. Candy designed a striking visual as the cornerstone for all promotion: a large lower-case letter "e."
The letter E was chosen to represent "environment," which is the topic of all of the festival's films. It was also floating around in Michael's mind from the 1970's when he was involved in the so-called "ecology movement" as a teen; there had been an attempt to brand the movement with a symbol—in the manner of the peace sign—that was based on the letter E and/or a Greek letter.
The Candy design renders the E with the graphic element found in the permanent festival logo—which is loosely based on a film reel. The graphic was rendered at various sizes and colors of green, a color that had been studiously avoided in the 2008 campaign and in the logo itself; Candy sought to reintroduce "green" as a color without resorting to what is understandably an overused idea in the realm of marketing "green" solutions for everything from consumer products to multi-national oil companies. By using lime green, blue-green, green-blue and olive, the color is varied and fresh. Then the chaos of all the overlapping and differently sized and colored icons was overlaid with a unifying color at the outline of every icon. Since it is not constrained by the big "e," this thin stroke in a light lime-green creates a fuzzy "halo" around the design.
Candy designed a bus poster, city poster, marquee posters and program cover. Candy also designed and printed 5000 two-sided postcards. The Candy design was provided to other agents for use in billboards (Fairway Outdoor Advertising), cable TV (Comcast Spotlight), print ads (Flagpole Magazine), and website. Candy was pleased to recommend Athens Printing Company to EcoFocus for the program, and also for their new environmentally-friendly large-format printing services. (Athens Printing Company expertly prints our Young, Foxy & Free magazine.) Candy provided its services at a reduced rate for this non-profit festival, and therefore is included as an in-kind sponsor of the event.
Last year, Michael was impressed by the quality and content of the festival's feature films; the idea behind the festival is that the movies are entertaining, even as they provide insight about topics such as transportation, food, energy, the environment. Because, as the festival tag line states, it's about where we live. Come to Ciné this month and see some engaging films at the 2009 EcoFocus Film Festival!
